visioneval / visioneval.github.io

Homepage for the VisionEval project

Website management

This website is built with the 'Hydeout' theme for GitHub pages. It uses Jekyll, a tool built in Ruby to generate web pages from content written in Markdown, and is integrated with GitHub.

There are three options for making updates to this website:

1. Editing files directly on GitHub -- not recommended, but possible.
2. Clone the repository, make changes with a text editor, and push commits back to master. You will only see the outcome of your changes after pushing your commits.
3. Recommended approach: clone the repository, make changes with a text editor, preview those changes locally using Jekyll (see below), then push when satisfied with the changes.

The third approach is detailed here:

• Windows machines need to download and install Ruby
• Open a Unix or Unix-like command-line utility (Terminal on Mac, Git BASH on Windows will work)
• Install Jekyll with gem install jekyll. See details here
• Install bundler with gem install bundler. This Ruby tool updates all needed Ruby dependencies.
• Clone this repository to your machine, navigate to it (e.g., cd ~/<pathtorepos>/VisionEval.org), and run bundle install.
• Now you can make edits to the contents. In combination with the serve command below, you can preview the changes live before pushing to the repository. The first time you do this, you'll need to build the rendered pages with:

bundle exec jekyll build

Then, to preview the edits live as you go, run the following:

bundle exec jekyll serve

If you have already built the pages once before, simply run the serve command to preview changes live. These are essentially the same steps that GitHub takes when generating a gh-pages page from a repository, and let you preview the rendered site as you make changes on the fly. Then you can push the completed batch of edits all at once.

Example instructions from another open-source project are here: https://github.com/stan-dev/stan-dev.github.io/wiki/Using-the-Jeykll-Based-Website

Maintain the Ruby Gems with bundle update.

VisionEval

The working version of the VisionEval project is currently here.

What is VisionEval?

See the overview of VisionEval here

visioneval.github.io's Issues

Revise content

• Too much text on pages, break up with subheadings and graphics
• Should be able to guide new users to understand goals of VE, Pooled Fund, how they connect to existing models. New users should be able to navigate through the site and understand how to apply VE models.

Completed:

• Included case studies, in information for users
• Text has been changed to emphasize this is a collaborative project, hosted on GitHub, not a standalone, one-off project.

Tutorial Links on home page

The tutorial links for the individual models should point into a useful place in the current docs (and if there isn't a good place - i.e. we don't want to throw people into the deep end - remove them and send people elsewhere to an overview of available models).

Add VisionEval package repository

The VisionEval installer builder can produce an installer with an "online" option, which installs VE and all its dependencies from source packages stored in an online repository. It is desirable to provide an online repository consistent with the current release build at "https://visioneval.org/packages" or alternatively at "https://packages.visioneval.org".

The first URL form might be easy to implement in the current visioneval.github.io repository, except that it requires versioning over a gigabyte of packages into subfolders (see github.com/eddelbuettel/drat - there's a reason Dirk makes "drat" a separate repository from the project itself!) .

The second URL form would support hosting on another server, which would have a home page in HTML (see http://packages.ropensci.org or drat itself or even my personal site at https://visioneval.jeremyraw.com/R). See the "R" subfolder in the VE-Installer "www" tree, and the "publish-installers.sh" script in "build/scripts" for how the repository trees might be created and maintained. There's no reason the HTML wrapper couldn't be done in Jekyll using a consistent style as VisionEval.org itself.

Additional activities (backlog):
Either approach would support creating subfolder snapshots of the repository from earlier builds, e.g. "https://packages.visioneval.org/release-0.2", whereas "https://packages.visioneval.org" by itself always gets you the current release.

Better navigation

• Use theme with a sidebar and submenus, for more clear navigation
• Links to external sites should go to new web page