The official website and blog of Rotational Labs.
This repository maintains the content for the rotational.io website, generated using Hugo. Contributors to the blog or website should review this README carefully for workflow and style guidelines. Thank you so much for your efforts for Rotational!
After cloning the repository from origin or from your fork, and changing into the root directory of the repository, you'll need to install Hugo. On Mac, we recommend using Homebrew as follows:
$ brew install hugo
You can check the version of Hugo as follows:
$ hugo version
It may be helpful to ensure the installed version of Hugo matches the deployment Hugo version, which can be found here.
Once Hugo is installed, run a local server as follows:
$ hugo serve -D
Note that the -D flag enables draft content, which is necessary to see any draft posts or content that you're writing. With the local server running, you can navigate to http://localhost:1313/ to view the rendered website. Everytime you make changes in the repository, the website will be re-rendered and you can simply refersh the page to see it.
To create a new blog post, use the hugo new command as follows:
$ hugo new blog/YYYY-MM-DD-title-of-blog.md
To automatically add the date, you can use hugo new blog/$(date +%F)-title.md or you can use the helper script we've created as follows:
$ ./bin/new-blog.sh "Title of My Awesome Blog Post"
NOTE: ensure that these commands are run in the root of the project.
This will create a new file in the content/en/blog directory (English is the default language for our site) that you can open and begin to edit. When creating new blog content, Hugo uses the archetypes/blog.md template file and generates the following frontmatter:
---
title: "Title Of My Awesome Blog Post"
slug: "title-of-my-awesome-blog-post"
date: "2021-03-20T11:45:48-04:00"
draft: true
image_webp: images/blog/
image: images/blog/
author: Your Name
description : "Add Description Here"
---
The next steps are as follows:
- Update the
authoranddescriptionfields. - Find a blog image from Unsplash and add to
image_webpandimagefields. - Write the blog post!
Our current theme makes use of WebP - an image format created by Google that is supposed to be smaller and richer to power web and mobile applications. However, because WebP is not fully supported by all browsers, the theme requires both a JPEG/PNG version of an image and the WebP version.
Likely most of the images we'll use will come in a JPEG/PNG format. To convert them to WebP on the command line, download the cwebp encoder tool. The download will be an archive file containing the entire codec for the webp protocol, extract the bin/cwebp utility from it and place it somewhere in your $PATH, e.g. in ~/bin. When you run the utility the first time, your system will probably block it since it was downloaded from the web and not installed with a digital signature. Open System Preferences > Security and Privacy and allow the program to be executed (it will probably prompt you again when you do this, select the Open button when it does).
To convert a JPEG to WebP, run the following command:
$ cwebp -q 80 static/images/test.jpg -o static/images/test.webp
The -q flag is a "quality flag" which should be a number between 0 (worst quality) and 100 (best quality). This flag controls the lossiness of the compression algorithm. Alternatively, you can use the -lossless flag to maximize the quality of the conversion. The -o flag is the output path to save the file to.
When possible, we aim to translate blog posts from their original language into the other languages offered via the Rotational webpage.
Our practice so far has been to have the translations performed via Fiverr. We provide the translator with a Word doc, where the original Markdown has been copied in (keeping all the formatting as is). The cost is about $35 for a 1500-word post (this may vary from language-to-language), and takes about 2-3 days.
In future, we would like to introduce an additional LQA (Linguistic Quality Assurance) pass by a second translator to validate the original translation.
We strongly recommend that new blog posts are submitted as Pull Requests and reviewed there as part of the editorial workflow.
NOTE: Make sure that the
draft: truein the front matter is removed or changed todraft: falsebefore publication!
Once edited, when the PR is merged into the main branch, GitHub Actions will automatically publish the blog to our website; it may take a few minutes but please keep refreshing the page to make sure the changes worked correctly.
If manual deployment is required (e.g. to publish a branch that is not main), you can use the following script:
$ ./bin/publish.sh
Please note that this will require all changes to be committed before using it.
We couldn't do what we do without the contributions of others, so we want to acknowledge and thank them for their efforts. Our website uses the following open source tools and royalty-free media: