VAHC Homepage

The homepage of Workshop on Visual Analytics in Healthcare (VAHC).

Update Content

You can use the online VSCode editor to update any .md files and GitHub Action will automatically rebuild and publish the website after saving changes online (it will be committed to the main branch).

Install and Quick Start

The VAHC homepage is built based on Pelican, a Python-powered static site generator. You can install Pelican via several different methods. The simplest is via Pip and specify using markdown:

python -m pip install "pelican[markdown]"

Then, you can clone the repo and go to the root folder of the cloned repo:

pelican -r -l

The default local dev site will be served at http://localhost:8000/. You can now open web browser and check the website for development.

Deployment

To deploy the generated static site on GitHub Pages, the following steps should be followed:

1. Enable workflow permissions. In "Settings / Action / General", ensure the "Workflow permissions" is set to "Read and write permissions".
2. Enable GitHub Action and add a new workflow main.yml. Copy the following content to create the workflow action. It will take a few minutes to run. Once it shows completed without any error in the Action, you can move next step.
3. Enable the GitHub Pages. In "Settings / Pages", select:
   • Source: Deploy from a branch
   • Branch: gh-pages, /(root)

If everything works fine, you can find the gh-pages branch has been deployed on GitHub Pages and you can access it.

# This is a basic workflow to help you get started with Actions

name: Deploy Latest Pages by Pelican

# Controls when the workflow will run
on:
  # Triggers the workflow on push or pull request events but only for the "main" branch
  push:
    branches: [ "main" ]
  pull_request:
    branches: [ "main" ]

  # Allows you to run this workflow manually from the Actions tab
  workflow_dispatch:

# A workflow run is made up of one or more jobs that can run sequentially or in parallel
jobs:
  # This workflow contains a single job called "build"
  build:
    # The type of runner that the job will run on
    runs-on: ubuntu-latest

    # Steps represent a sequence of tasks that will be executed as part of the job
    steps:
      # Checks-out your repository under $GITHUB_WORKSPACE, so your job can access it
      - uses: actions/checkout@v3

      # Runs a single command using the runners shell
      - name: Run a one-line script
        run: echo Hello, Pelican!
          
      # Runs a build for pelican
      - name: GitHub Pages Pelican Build Action
        uses: nelsonjchen/gh-pages-pelican-action@0.1.10
        env:
          GITHUB_TOKEN: ${{ secrets.GITHUB_TOKEN }}

Settings

Due to the special needs of hosting a conference website, some settings in the pelicanconf.py have been customized to support conference hosting workflow.

1. DEFAULT_YEAR. It's obvious that you need to set this variable to the conference year accordingly.
2. PAST_EVENTS. This will be used for generating the footer links to past events.
3. *_SAVE_AS. Some features are not used by a simple conference website, such as author page, tag page, archive page, category page, etc. So, they are all disabled and removed from output list.

Create New Site

The content structure of each year is very similar (or just the same) to previous year. So you can create a new website for the coming year as follows:

1. Duplicate a latest year folder in content and rename to target year. For example, copy the folder 2023, paste and rename it to 2024 for the 2024.
2. Update the Category value in ALL .md files in the newly created folder. For example, update Category: 2024 in the 2024\index.md, 2024\call-for-papers.md, etc. As this category value will be used to generate the URL and folder, please ensure you updated ALL category information correctly. Otherwise the generated HTML files of other year may be affected.
3. Update the contents of each article in the new folder.