ONS Big Data Team Github.io website

This website was built using Jekyll & Minimal Mistakes.

• Jekyll: Jekyll is a simple and blog-aware static site generator built in Ruby. It takes a template directory containing raw text files in various formats, and spits out a complete, ready-to-publish static website. Jekyll also happens to be the engine behind GitHub Pages, which means you can use Jekyll to host your project’s page, blog, or website from GitHub’s servers for free.

• Minimal Mistakes: A flexible two-column Jekyll theme, suited for personal sites, blogs, and portfolios hosted on GitHub

Requirements to run this website locally

1. Install Ruby

Ruby should come pre-installed on all OSX computers. You can check if Ruby is installed by running ruby -v. It should return with Ruby version 2.0.0 or higher.

The version I am currently using is:

ruby 2.4.1p111 (2017-03-22 revision 58053) [x86_64-darwin16]

If you’re running a lower version, you can update:

gem install ruby

2. Install Bundler

Bundler is a package manager that will aid you in installing all the Jekyll dependencies. To install it simply run:

gem install bundler

Running bundle -v in the terminal tells me the version I am currently using is:

Bundler version 1.15.4

3. Clone this repo

Move with the terminal to the folder location where you want to place this website. Now you can close this repo using:

git clone https://github.com/ONSBigData/ONSBigData.github.io.git

Before proceeding any further, make sure to move inside the website folder, via

cd ONSBigData.github.io.git

Type ls and you should see more or less the following files and folders:

Gemfile        Rakefile          _layouts        _site       scripts
Gemfile.lock   config.yml        _pages          assets
LICENSE.txt    _data             _posts          banner.js
README.md      _includes         _sass           package.json

4. Run bundle to install everything else

Run this command in the directory that contains the Gemfile:

bundle install

(Source: https://mmistakes.github.io/minimal-mistakes/docs/installation/)

6. Test that everything works!

At this point, all the setup is complete. Run the following code:

bundle exec jekyll serve

This command runs a “watch” on the entire server. Changes made to any files (except the configuration file!) will be compiled into static HTML.

Now go to the url http://localhost:4000.

Your are ready to modify the website and see the changes reflected immediately when refreshing this webpage.

When you are happy with the changes commit your changes and push them to GitHub.

How to modify this website

For a more conplete guide on how the website is structured refer to the theme website. This section covers the basics you might want to do to modify this website.

The About Page

To modify the content of the publication page you can simply edit the markdown file _pages/home.md

The Publication Page

To modify the content of the publication page you can simply edit the markdown file _pages/publications.md If you added a new publication which has an associated GitHub repo, don't forget to add a link to it using the GitHub icon:

<a href="insert-your-URL-to-the-github-repo-here">
  <i class="fa fa-fw fa-github" aria-hidden="true"></i>
</a>

Blog

New post from scratch

Blog posts can be written as markdown files. This allow you to easily insert charts, code snippets in it, etc. To add a new blog post you need to do 3 things:

1. Name your .md file using the following convention:

YYYY-MM-DD-your-post-name-here.md

where YEAR is a four-digit number, MONTH and DAY are both two-digit numbers

2. Put your YYYY-MM-DD-your-post-name-here.md file in the _posts folder

3. Add, if not already there, the Front Matter to your file. It should indicate at least the title of the post and an excerpt.

---
title: 'Happy campers: Using machine learning to identify caravans in Zoopla data'
excerpt: 'Using machine learning to extract holiday homes in Zoopla data'
---

ProTip: Remember to write unique excerpt descriptions for each post for improved SEO and archive listings.

If the post already exist. How do I republish it here?

If a post already exists, is posted somewhere else and you just want to add it, only thing you need to do is to convert that post to a markdown file.

To do that you can use the Python script named html_to_md_post.py in the scripts/ folder.

Navigate with the terminal to the scripts/ folder:

cd scripts/

then run the script with the following required arguments:

python3 html_to_md_post.py arg1 arg2 arg3

where:

• arg1 is the url to the blog post you want to convert
• arg2 is the title of the post (which will be placed in the Front Matter)
• arg3 is the name wich will be used to save the new .md file in the _posts folder

As an example:

python3 html_to_md_post.py "https://digitalblog.ons.gov.uk/2017/06/21/happy-campers-using-machine-learning-to-identify-caravans-in-zoopla-data/" "Happy campers: Using machine learning to identify caravans in Zoopla data" "2017-06-21-happy-campers.md"

After running this script a new .md file will be generated in the _posts folder. You can open the new generated file and check that all links and markdown titles have been generated correctly. The script uses this API service to convert the HTML URL in a markdown file.

Finally do step 2. and 3. (is not compulsory, but the excerpt is not generated automatically so you need to add it manually) as before for the post from scratch.

LICENSE

Released under the MIT License.