Languages, Systems, and Data Lab at UC Santa Cruz

Website for the Languages, Systems, and Data Lab at UC Santa Cruz.

This website is largely based on the Cornell PL website, with special thanks to Rachit Nigam for technical and moral support!

Hosting

The LSD website available at https://lsd-ucsc.github.io/ and mirrored with some delay at https://lsd.ucsc.edu/. If you ever notice discrepancies between these, please make an issue.

• Jan 2024 - We noticed that the mirroring wasn't working. Changes made on Jan 3rd were visible immediately on https://lsd-ucsc.github.io/ but as of Jan 7th were not visible at https://lsd.ucsc.edu/. The ticket INC1800159 tracks this issue.
• Dec 2023 - UCSC hosting for the website website switched from ITS hosting on AFS to a new AWS host. We discussed how to mirror and struck an agreement in ticket INC1792531 that UCSC would run a cron-job on their server to mirror the site from https://lsd-ucsc.github.io/ to https://lsd.ucsc.edu/. If there's ever a discrepancy betwen those two URLs, we need to ask someone at UCSC to take a look at the cron-job.

Making changes to the public site

Change the public website in three steps!

1. Change the markdown files and commit your changes to the main branch.
2. Push your changes back to the repository. No pull request is necessary. If you prefer to use a pull request, please notify someone in the casl-group mailing list.
   • Any changes made to the main branch will be reflected in the public site after CI/CD runs.
   • The public branch of this repo may be viewed at https://lsd-ucsc.github.io/.
3. Check that your commit results in a ✔️ build status and not a ❌ build status!
   • You can find the build status for your commit at the top of the repo page or on the commit log or find details of the run on the workflows page.
   • If you're unsure of whether your changes will build, then push to a new branch and make a pull request (please notify someone in the casl-group mailing list to check your pull request).
4. Your changes will appear at https://lsd-ucsc.github.io/ when the build status is a ✔️ and will be mirrored at https://lsd.ucsc.edu/ after approximately one hour.

You don't need to install hugo because the public site has CI/CD set up. To see how to build the site locally, click or scroll to the bottom.

Content Mangement

Most of the content is stored under /content/home.

• about.md: Content for the About widget on the home page.
• news.md: Latest news about the group. To add a new news item, use the format from the other items. Since the [[news]] list is ordered, make sure that the item is added to the top.
• faculty.md, students.md, alumni.md...: Content for various groups of members.

Adding news items

Edit the news file using one of the formats. See the examples in the file.

Adding a new person

You'll need the person's name as they want it to appear, title (e.g., "Ph.D. Student", "Assistant Professor", etc.), optionally a photo, and optionally a website URL. If you don't provide a photo, a default image will appear.

Edit content/home/faculty.md or content/home/students.md and follow the format of existing entries. If the person has a photo, add it to the static/img/ directory.

LSD Seminar

To create a new LSD Seminar page:

hugo new lsd-seminar/<term>.md

where <term> is of the form 2020fa.

Next, edit the file generated in content/lsd-seminar/<term>.md and update the link in config.toml for lsd-seminar to point to the latest webpage.

Styling

The styling templates are stored under layouts/. Hugo uses a priority-based override method for determining which template to use. By default, it uses the template from theme/academic/layouts unless there is another template of the same name (and directory structure) in layout/.

For example, if you want to override the styling in theme/academic/layout/foo/bar.html, simply copy it to layout/foo/bar.html and add your changes.

Building the site locally

The website is generated by the Hugo website generator and uses the Academic theme. The theme is stored as a submodule under themes/academic/. We use an older version of the Academic theme, before it morphed into Wowchemy. (Don't update the theme submodule unless you know what you're doing.)

1. Recursively clone the repository:

   git clone --recurse-submodules git@github.com:lsd-ucsc/lsd-ucsc.github.io-source.git
   

2. Install Go (ver >= 0.49.2) and Hugo (ver >= 1.11 && ver <= 49.2). Note: The website will not build with newer versions of Hugo.

3. Run hugo server -w to generate and serve the website locally.