RSE Team Blogs

This repository contains blogs by the central RSE team.

How to contribute a blog?

Development tools setup

• Make sure you have poetry installed.
• Clone the repository locally (git clone https://github.com/ImperialCollegeLondon/RSEBlog.git).
• Install the dependencies poetry install
• Install the pre-commit hooks poetry run pre-commit install

Adding your blog

• Create a .md file for your blog in the docs/posts folder and add the blog content to it. You can use the HackMD template for writing (collaborative) blogs. To edit the template, please sign in with, say, GitHub. This template is inspired from Collaborations Workshop 2024's blog template. The template is a guide to writing the blog and may be modified as suitable. After the blog is done, please make sure to clean up any non-essential template contents except for the actual blog contents.
• The file name should start with the publication date without spaces or dashes to facilitate finding the posts in the file structure, for example 20240722_post_name.md for the example below.
• Any images should be added to docs/posts/images/<blog-name>.
• Add all the relevant metadata (for example, date, authors, categories, tags) at the start of the blog:

---
date: 2024-07-22
authors:
  - GitHub_username_author_a
  - GitHub_username_author_b
  - GitHub_username_author_c
categories:
  - category_a
  - category_b
  - category_c
tags:
  - tag_a
  - tag_b
  - tag_c
---

# Blog title

Introduction

Note: If authors are not already listed in docs/.authors.yml, please add them. Similarly, any new categories should be listed under categories_allowed in mkdocs.yml. We should endeavour to keep categories very broad.

• After the introduction paragraph of the blog, include <!-- more -->. This will render a shorter version of the blog on the landing page with a Continue reading link.
• Preview the blog locally using mkdocs serve.
• Open a Pull Request and request for a review.

Additional features

The global settings of this repository (based on the Material for MkDocs theme) allows you to include additional features to your blog posts like admonitions, code blocks, etc.

Admonitions

Admonitions or call-outs are useful for including side content without interrupting the flow of your blog.

• To include an admonition block, start with !!! followed by a single type qualifier keyword.
• Add the block content on the next line, indented by four spaces.
• The type qualifier (in titlecase) is the default title of the block. You can add a customised title after the type qualifier in quoted string.

!!! note "Placeholder for title"

    Lorem ipsum dolor sit amet, consectetur adipiscing elit. Nulla et euismod
    nulla. Curabitur feugiat, tortor non consequat finibus, justo purus auctor
    massa, nec semper lorem quam in massa.

Refer to the admonitions documentation to learn more about the different types of admonitions and possible customisations.

Code blocks

• To add code blocks, begin and end the block with lines containing three backticks.
• To add syntax highlighting to those blocks, add the language shortcode directly after the opening block. Refer to the list of available lexers to find the shortcode for a given language.
• To add a custom title to the code block use title="<custom title>" option directly after the language shortcode.

Here is an example of a Python code block that adds three numbers:

``` py title="add_numbers.py"
def add(x, y, z):
  return x + y + z
```

Refer to the code blocks documentation for more customisations.

Rendering mathematical expressions

You can use LaTeX markup to render mathematical expressions, enabled via Mathjax and mdx_math.

• To write an inline expression, wrap the expression in $ delimiters.
• To write the expression as a block, delimit the expression with either $$ or as a code block with the math shortcode.

Customising images

Images are converted to figures automatically using the MkDocs Caption extension. This extension enables putting captions on tables and lists as well as images, however the most basic behaviour uses the image's Alt Text field to populate the figure caption.

For Example:

![figure caption](img.jpg)

Will be converted to:

<p>
<figure id=_figure-1>
    <img alt="figure caption" src="img.jpg" />
    <figcaption>Figure 1: figure caption</figcaption>
</figure>
</p>

Which will render as a centred image with the caption "Figure 1: figure caption" and maintain the alt text of the image as "figure caption". MkDocs Caption also provides other ways to define the Figure caption, which allows you to have different text for the figure and alt text.

If you do not want the image to have a caption, you can label it as a no-caption class using an Attribute List. Reminder, it is important to include Alt Text for accessibility reasons.

![figure caption](img.jpg) {: .no-caption }

You can then add to the attribute list to further specify the style. A useful one is for centring images:

![figure caption](img.jpg) {: .no-caption style="display:block;margin:auto;"}

More information on image style options can be found in the Mozilla Documentation.