NBLUG.org

This is the nblug.org web site. It's static HTML, built from Markdown files in the content/ directory using Pelican.

Getting Started

To make it easy to reproduce the site exactly, we install pinned versions of all of the tools used to build it in a Python "virtual environment". Bootstrap requires this tool in the host system. On a Debian-like system:

sudo apt install python3-venv

Next create and initialize the virtual environment:

make init

Building the Site

You can build and view the site locally with these commands:

make devserver
make regenerate

This will launch a web server in the background and monitor the Pelican site contents and configuration, automatically rebuilding when changes occur. You can view this local site at http://localhost:8000/. When you're done you can stop it with make stopserver.

When you're ready to publish to the real site, run these commands:

make publish
make rsync_upload

For the second command to work you will need shell access to enigma.wiredgoats.com (and your username must be set in ~/.ssh/config if it differs from your local username).

Don't forget to commit your changes to the git repo!

Adding Events

TL;DR run ./add-talk.py.

All of the events are stored as text Markdown files incontent/news/. These files start with a metadata header in which we place some NBLUG-specific data about the speaker time of the presentation. A blank line follows this header, then the talk description in Markdown format (which may include embedded HTML if necessary). For example, content/news/2016-11-20-strfry.md:

Title: Data Security with strfry()
Tags: general meeting
Event: 2016-12-25 7:30 pm to 9:00 pm
Speaker: Kyle Rankin
Location: O'Reilly Media
Author: Alan Cecil

This talk will cover a frequently-overlooked security feature of the GNU C library: the ability to apply one-way encryption to NUL-terminated strings.

In this example, the Speaker field is for the name of the presenter, while the Author field contains the name of the poster—that is, your name.

The Tags field should contain one of these values:

• general meeting
• installfest
• board meeting

In the filename "2016-11-20" is today's date, when this notice is posted.

The script ./add-talk.py automatically generates a general meeting news item for the next talk date (second Tuesday of the month) based on answers given at an interactive prompt.

Migrating Pages from the Old Site

When migrating pages from the Drupal site, an additional metadata field can be used to make sure the page shows up with the same URL:

Drupal_Node: <number>

You can get this value from the URL of the page, which will look something like this:

http://nblug.org/node/<number>

See content/news/2011-11-08-gpu-password-cracking-election.md for an example of this.

Some pages on Drupal don't actually list a publication date. For these, use the event date instead.

FAQ

Why am I seeing warnings about variants of an article?

If you are seeing messages like these, they indicate that the "slug" (name to use in the page URL) collides with another article:

WARNING: There are 2 variants of "hackfest" with lang en
WARNING:     /home/twm/nblug.org/content/news/2011-04-12-hackfest.md
WARNING:     /home/twm/nblug.org/content/news/2012-01-10-hackfest.md

You can fix this by adding a Slug metadata field at the top of the file. For a hackfest, try adding the year so that the whole like looks something like this:

Slug: hackfest-2014

Note that this will change the URL of the page, so it's best to catch this before publishing the article.