RIT has gotten really picky about their rebranding, we should use one of the accent colors from the pallette:

https://www.rit.edu/marketing/brandportal/brand-elements/colors

Serious props to everyone working on it :)

Summary

Reorganize site navigation bar to fit more options via dropdown menus

Background

In #85, @ct-martin added a calendar page. It would be nice to add this to the navigation bar to make it more visible. However, the navigation bar is at capacity for what it can display. To mitigate, we should add dropdown sub-menus to existing options to accommodate more space and tie some things together.

Details

Here is the breadcrumb structure I would like to see for the navigation bar:

• Home
• About
  • LibreCorps
  • Events
  • Projects
• Announcements
• Calendar
• Get Involved

Outcome

Make new pages on the website more visible

Under "Suggested Topics"

there is

Humantairian and Civics

I'll try to sort out where to make the s/Humantairian/Humanitarian/ change next but wanted to note this in case I get lost in the Jekyll/Github pages weeds and don't find my way back.

It got silently changed again, please look at https://rit.edu/brandportal

Summary

Post up a calendar event on the FOSS@RIT site for "National Civic Day of Hacking" coming up on 12 September 2020

Background

@itprofjacobs shared National Civic Day of Hacking coming up on 12 September 2020:

Join The City of Rochester and RIT for the 2020 National Day of Civic Hacking, which brings together civic leaders, public servants, designers, coders, and engaged citizens to partner with local government and community groups to tackle some of our toughest challenges.

This year, we invite you to join us for a day of collective action to help those most in need of social safety net services during COVID-19. Have other pressing issues in your community that you’d like to work on? You’re welcome to join too! Everyone is welcome! No previous experience, expertise, or prep-work required!

Details

See the Runbook page for guidance on how to do this:

https://runbook.fossrit.community/infra/website/#how-to-add-calendar-events

Outcome

More people know about the National Civic Day of Hacking event this year! 🎉

privacyBadger was detecting the uicdn.toast.com domain s a tracker and blocking it (which amkes sense given the tui calendar tracks users using google analytics by default so they can see how many people use their open source package. This tracking is disabled on this site, however enough other sites clearly have it enabled that privacyBadger has flagged it as a third party tracker.

when this domain is blocked, the calendar and some of its dependencies cannot load and the calendar page shows this:

Some solutions:

• whitelist this domain in your privacy extensions
  • update the error message to explain this to users
• replace the calendar with a more provacy friendly one

At the moment, the old FOSS website is outdated, and does not contain the current happenings with FOSS@MAGIC.

That begs the question, is it worth (or politically possible) taking over the https://foss.rit.edu domain again?

There needs to be a better explanation of how to set up a development environment for this Jekyll project. Currently, I'm testing by pushing things to production because I haven't figured out how to do this yet. 😕

I need to follow up with @ct-martin to figure out how he is doing this, from some of our in-person conversations.

Edit 1: See Christian's comment here: "Jekyll can watch for changes and rebuild. So I run bundle exec jekyll serve (once Jekyll is installed) and then wait every time I save a file for it to rebuild"

Summary

Remove the Talks page and move the content intended to publish there to Events

Background

The Talks page is intended for FOSS Talks and possibly speaker slide decks, if they are willing to share. However, each FOSS Talk is technically an event we run too. So it probably makes more sense to consider UX since that is where someone will likely look for current happenings in the RIT FOSS community.

Details

1. Migrate any existing (relevant) content from Talks to Events
2. Remove Talks from navigation and home page
3. Check other pages for any remaining dead links, update page content as necessary

Outcome

1. Better user experience to find updates on what is happening in the community now
2. The top nav bar becomes less crowded and busy

The logo is really big and takes up a lot of space.

The RIT recommended size is 225px wide

Nothing in events for Election Night 2019. Need reviews for #75 and probably additional patches.

fix is in https://github.com/ritjoe/fossrit.github.io/commit/3aed976cf15061c344a1f47e2e7e76b9be7258a0

just as easy to show in the diff as to describe

PR is imminent

Problem

When visiting the website, it's unclear what FOSS@RIT or FOSS@MAGIC is or what kind of things happen with the group.

Analysis

One of the key things that will be most important for future, incoming students (regardless of year) is clearly communicating what it is that we do, what kind of activities we're involved with (e.g. Software Freedom Day, Election Night Hackathon, etc.), and examples of what we've done. This is similar to foss.rit.edu but it would be better to take a much more minimal design to this.

This accomplishes the purpose of:

1. Supporting existing program with more easily accessible info
2. Bring in new students with goal of turning them from participants => contributors

Implementation

1. Add space for info block about the program
2. Write brief intro to the program, add GitHub project links / other live resources of student work from the program (in a pretty sort of way, not just hyperlinks…)
3. Deploy!

Before, the newest announcement post would appear on the home page of the website. That feature was later disabled on the RITlug site. It would be nice to bring that functionality back since we plan to make use of announcements on this site.

Relevant code:

@itprofjacobs to send me the approved logo from Jen soon and I can swap them out.

Problem

When visiting the website, it's unclear how to get involved with FOSS@MAGIC or what you have to do to "be a part of the {club,group,secret society,etc.}".

Analysis

We need to have some clearly documented steps about how a student, either current or incoming, can become involved with the FOSS@MAGIC program. This is a bigger topic than maybe just a website, but as students and alumni, we can maybe offer specific points about how someone can get involved.

A numbered, ordered list of steps that can be accomplished (and easy to think of as "accomplished" or "complete") is needed. The steps would be highlighted on the main page to introduce students for how to participate, things they can try working on to get started, and other ideas for participating. The end result of this "onboarding" guide would be getting "added" to the GitHub organization as a visible form of recognizing the person completing the steps.

This accomplishes the purpose of:

1. Supporting existing program with more easily accessible info
2. Ensure longevity of program by clearly having steps to get involved
3. Bring in new students with goal of turning them from participants => contributors

Implementation

1. Brainstorm ideas of participation in the program from a student perspective
2. Organize ideas into ordered list of tasks
3. Come with a way to "verify" completion [*]
4. Create visual steps with links / help for completing every step on the site
5. Deploy!

[*] Note: I don't want this to be too heavy on "verification" or proving your work… more like a simple check. It's not about indoctrinating people into a secret society or team – we want it to be easy for interested people to become involved and then move up in participation and activity over time.

See these lines:

These should be set by a variable in _config.yml. It will be easier to maintain these centrally in one place.

Summary

Scale images in announcements / Jekyll posts automatically for mobile devices

Background

When an image is used in a new Jekyll post, if the image is large, it doesn't scale correctly. The horizontal scrolling is disrupted and the image flows off of the page. It disrupts the browsing experience. A better way is to downscale the image appropriately for the screen size of the current device.

Details

This is new to me. Need to figure out best way to do this with how the site is currently set up.

Outcome

Better mobile browsing experience when images are used in Jekyll posts

Currently, Travis builds and tests the site, but the built version is not actually getting to GitHub Pages (see #117). This is the desired step-by-step outcome:

1. Open PR
2. PR is built and tested
3. Tests pass; merge PR to master
4. Travis builds/tests master
5. Tests pass; Travis green-lights a deployment
6. Travis pushes built site contents to gh-pages branch
7. GitHub Pages production environment only uses gh-pages branch

Might have some additional tweaking to do, but making note of the findings that came up today. Thanks @ct-martin for raising attention to the fact that the original CI implementation wasn't working as I understood.

i found one HFOSS blog archived on archive.org and have been trying to generally list out all of them on the FOSS megalist, but it would be nice if snapshotting them on archive.org or somehow exporting the blogs to this page (mostly to fix the student blogs link on the homepage) were part of the setup/teardown process for those wordpress sites

These would go in .github/CONTRIBUTING.md

I believe @jrtechs mentioned maybe being able to contribute something here?

Might do to see if something has been added along these lines to https://github.com/RITlug/ritlug.github.io

This is complementary to, but in a way in the opposite direction from, #36

From @Nolski :

since the freenode channel blew up, so did our matrix bridging and our matrix room and our #rit-foss libera channel are no longer bridged. I think we should just change the matrix link on the website to point to the matrix->libera channel through the riot app.

see also some discussion in https://riot.im/app/#/room/#rit-foss:mozilla.org

Font Awesome seems to be moving to requiring an accord to use their CDN, or requiring self-hosted. This site currently uses their CDN but does not have an account. It is unclear if they intend to keep supporting the free CDN without an account, and documentation is using the free CDN seems to be locked up as well.

The best solutions would be either:

1. Self-host Font Awesome
2. Use Fork Awesome, a fork of Font Awesome 4 (which also has icons for a lot of open source projects)

https://forkaweso.me/Fork-Awesome/

We could get a free account, but with the track record on things requiring accounts, it'd be easier not to and would block this issue.

There are only a handful of places where icons are used on the site, so this should be an easy fix.

Review needed for #77 for this please. Should be straightforward.

What This is About

As we come to the close of the semester, we have decided to continue these virtual FOSS Hours for the foreseeable future. In doing so, meeting will now be hosted every other week. Therefore, the next official meeting is to be slated for May 7th.

@Nolski mentioned idea of using Docker Compose instead of the shell script introduced in #35. It would be a cleaner way of managing the development environment. Given my previous experience with it in other projects, I think it would be a nice change.

I'm filing this for consideration in a post-v1.0 pull request. If someone has time and wants to play with this, feel free to try taking this one on!

LibreCorps is on the home page but doesn't exist in the header. Add it to the header or footer for extra visibility as well.

https://fossrit.github.io/open-rit/ seems to have been a placeholder - maybe that item should redirect to https://openr.it?

We probably want to build on this with some brief getting-started guides for Matrix and (possibly) Telegram integrations, but this IMNSHO is the place to start.

Need help identifying a reasonable icon to use for an IRC button at the bottom of the initial view of the page, but putting

http://webchat.freenode.net/?&channels=rit-foss

there is a quick to implement, quick to use, relatively easy and so potentially very useful first step in revamping our overall presentation to help people find us to talk with us.

We are always going to have a sort of raggedy back-end of lots of sites where things are or once were going on. We aren't going to solve that. But we can make the front end mesh better with where things are happening now, and top of the line there is IRC (with its various integrations).

Summary

Post up an event profile on the FOSS@RIT site for "National Civic Day of Hacking" coming up on 12 September 2020

Background

@itprofjacobs shared National Civic Day of Hacking coming up on 12 September 2020:

Join The City of Rochester and RIT for the 2020 National Day of Civic Hacking, which brings together civic leaders, public servants, designers, coders, and engaged citizens to partner with local government and community groups to tackle some of our toughest challenges.

This year, we invite you to join us for a day of collective action to help those most in need of social safety net services during COVID-19. Have other pressing issues in your community that you’d like to work on? You’re welcome to join too! Everyone is welcome! No previous experience, expertise, or prep-work required!

Details

See the Runbook page for guidance on how to do this:

https://runbook.fossrit.community/infra/website/#how-to-create-event-profiles

Outcome

More people know about the National Civic Day of Hacking event this year! 🎉

The footer has this line:

Needs to better reflect this site's license. Probably best to omit altogether since we're not using any of the original content, only code.

From comment in FOSSRIT/runbook#30

As I'm reading this I'm also realizing the code functionality is no longer the same as the RITlug site from combination of things that weren't merged to the FOSS site after being added to the RITlug site as well as changes for FOSS-specific things that didn't go upstream to the RITlug site. It would be worth explicitly mentioning that somewhere to prevent confusion.

Some specific examples for reference:

• RITlug has a post-event layout that uses extra metadata for a nicer displaying of events
  • There are some accompanying template changes for this too (beyond the layout)
• FOSSRIT removed the talk layout & tweaked other templates as a result
• RITlug has a calendar page (PR #85 for merging here)
• RITlug uses metadata more heavily as a result
  • This matters for docs

To be clear, I'm not looking to completely dissociate the sites. This isn't too big of an issue, but as the sites are heavily related in code, it would be helpful to have noted in CONTRIBUTING.md for anyone who is contributing to both sites (particularly since the README.md notes this site is based on the RITlug site).

I believe @jrtechs mentioned maybe being able to contribute something here?

Might do to see if something has been added along these lines to https://github.com/RITlug/ritlug.github.io

This is complementary to, but in a way in the opposite direction from, #36

The "Do" column is almost double the length of the "Discuss" column. It would be slightly more visually appealing to have the order swapped. (The real fix is equalizing the columns, but I need to think on re-categorization).

Problem

When visiting the website, it's unclear how someone could remotely get in touch with other FOSS students on campus without coming to a meeting.

Analysis

We want a clearly emphasized place of platforms that the FOSS@MAGIC program lives so it's easy for someone to check out the program and receive a response from the group. Currently, the best choices are IRC and the FLOSS Seminar mailing list (not my favorite choices for on-boarding new students or keeping people involved, but…).

We could embed a webchat client similar to what you find here on my website, or we could redirect them to the normal webchat client from freenode. The mailing list should have steps for subscribing (including the common problem of @g.rit.edu vs. @rit.edu).

This accomplishes the purpose of:

1. Supporting existing program with more easily accessible info
2. Ensure longevity of program by clearly having steps to get involved

Implementation

1. Add space towards bottom of page for "get involved" / "contact" info
2. Design with the idea of "click-and-go" to participating (making it easier for people to connect and stay in the loop without having to actively try to be in the loop)
3. Deploy!

Will get a new page for on-going Open@RIT discussion and planning on the site. Will fit under the new About dropdown added by @ct-martin in #145. Pending content from @itprofjacobs. I'll add some lines about the Knowledgebase.

On the get-involved portion of the website

https://fossrit.github.io/get-involved/

A link for the text

FOSS minor and FOSS-related classes

points to

https://www.rit.edu/gccis/igm/sites/rit.edu.gccis.igm/files/images/FOSS-MN%20Semesters.pdf

which is now 404 (all hail rebranding efforts!)

It would appear the official link for the minor is now

https://www.rit.edu/study/free-and-open-source-software-and-free-culture-minor

I'll dig around for my copy of this the https://github.com/FOSSRIT/fossrit.github.io repo and see if I can cobble together the fix for this, or worst case clone another copy to do so. So, no help needed until it comes time to test, approve, and deploy the fix. But, if someone got to it before me that'd be just fine too.

Currently it seems as though the calendar ics feed is generated based on events/posts on the jekyll site.

This essentially requires that people deal with git, pull requests, github .etc, and have everything set up locally to make changes to the site in order to add new events to the calendar.

A better alternative might be to set up a FOSSRIT calendar on a FOSSRIT or OPEN@RIT nextcloud instance (i believe one exists at opencloud.rit.edu) and use that as the calendar feed so that its easier to add FOSS events that are happening at RIT, such as FOSS hours

@jwflory before closing this, we should also make sure the runbook docs are linked from the website README.md

Originally posted by @ct-martin in FOSSRIT/tasks#107 (comment)

Setting up CI tests to ensure new contributions don't break the website will be helpful. Travis CI is my preferred tool of choice for this because of the close integration with a GitHub workflow. Maybe it's better to knock out #36 for this first though. Needs some investigation.