hullblogs.com

Aggregated posts from University of Hull students

This is an Eleventy powered website that aggregates RSS/Atom posts and presents them in reverse chronological order. It's purpose is to aggregate blog posts from current and past University of Hull students.

When it's live, you will be able to visit it here: https://hullblogs.com/.

To add your blog to the site, please follow the instructions below in the add your site section. You must be a current or past University of Hull student in order to get your blog added.

Note that because this uses a static site generator, the content won't update automatically. The site must be rebuilt in order for new posts to show up.

Add your blog

To add your blog, there are 2 ways you can do this - both of which are described below.

If you don't yet have a blog, keep reading! We've got some great resources to help you get started below.

I don't have any technical knowledge

Not a problem! Simply click this link and fill out this request form: Click me

You will need a GitHub account to do this.

I have some technical knowledge

If you aren't confident with editing JSON files, skip this section.

If you are confident with editing JSON files to GitHub, you can update the feeds.json file in this repository and add a new entry like this to a random position (except the very bottom).

Here's an example new entry:

{
	"author_name": "Your name here",
	"github_username": "your_github_username",
	"feed_uri": "https://example.com/feed/"
},

The 3 properties have the following meanings:

• author_name: Your name. Shown beneath your posts.
• github_username: Your GitHub username. Used for displaying your avatar.
• feed_uri: The URL of your Atom or RSS feed.

Editing feeds.json is easy. You can even do it right in your web browser here.

Once done, you can then open a pull request to get your blog added.

If a post includes the magic string __excludehullblogs__ either in it's title, description, or content (even if in a HTML comment etc), it will automatically be hidden from being displayed on hullblogs.com.

But I don't have a blog!

Not to worry! It's easy to set one up, and a fabulous experience to have too. Not only is it useful for remembering things you've done in the past, but it's great on your CV as well. Here are some places you can go to setup a free blog online with no hosting experience needed:

• Wordpress
• Blogger
• Squarespace (unclear as to whether it's free or not)

If you're looking for something to host yourself, these are great places to look:

• Wordpress
• GitHub Pages
• Netlify (starter is free)
  • Templates

Run your own instance

For development (and production, if you're in charge of the hullblogs.com website) purposes, it's sometimes useful to run your own instance of this website. These instructions will have you up and running in no time!

System (and user) Requirements

• Node.js
• Docker(optional)
• A text editor (for editing feeds.json)
• A web browser (we recommend Firefox)
• Basic knowledge of the Linux Terminal (or Windows Command Line)

Getting Started

First, clone this repository and cd into it:

git clone https://github.com/FreesideHull/hullblogs.com.git
cd hullblogs.com

Then, install the dependencies:

npm install

Now, you can build and serve the site locally:

npm start

If you just want to build it and not start the development server (e.g. if you're running a production instance), you can build it like so:

npm run build

It will take a moment to build, but then you'll get a message like this that shows the URL you can visit your local instance of the size:

If you're debugging the feed compatibility code, then setting the DEBUG_FEEDITEMS environment variable to a value will cause processed to be logged to the console.

If you're working on the CSS, note that Eleventy will not auto-rebuild & reload the browser. For that, you need to re-save a file it does watch, such as index.html, .eleventy.js, etc (even if you haven't made any changes).

Getting Started with Docker

Clone the repo as above and cd into it. The Dockerfile can be found here

sudo docker build -t hullblogs . # builds the container
sudo docker run -itdp unused-port-number:80 hullblogs # runs the site on a port that is available
# visit localhost:port or ip:port if you are hosting on a VPS and the site should be available to view

If you don't want to clone the repo and just want to run the site you can do sudo docker run -itdp unused-port-number:80 crimsontome427/hullblogs:main

Using a tool like Ouroboros you can automatically update the container without the need for a rebuild each time, this can only be done if Ouroboros can see your container in a registry.

Environment Variables

The following environment variables can be used to influence the behaviour of the aggregator.

Environment Variable	Purpose
FILTER_FEED	Set to any value to enable the filtering of posts based on whether they contain any bad words. Uses futility, but with a custom algorithm on top to avoid the "Scunthorpe Problem".

Example of setting an environment variable when running a build:

FILTER_FEED=true npm run build

Automatically rebuilding

To automatically rebuild the site every day, add this to your root crontab (sudo EDITOR=nano crontab -e):

sudo -u www-data bash -c 'cd /srv/hullblogs.com && npm run build >last-build.log 2>&1'

....replacing /srv/hullblogs.com with the path to the root of the git repository that you cloned.

Design Decisions

A number of decisions were made in the design process of this website. These are documented with the reasoning behind them here.

• Using a static site generator: This greatly simplifies the website and the maintenance thereof.
• Not using a CSS framework (e.g. bootstrap): CSS Grid and CSS flexbox are powerful enough such that a framework such as bootstrap is not needed. In addition, the HTML structure and overall project architecture is greatly simplified by avoiding such frameworks. The aim is ensure it is as simple as possible to understand and maintain.

Contributing

Contributions are very welcome - both issues and pull requests! To add your blog to the site, please see the add your blog section above.

FAQ

I want to complain about / request takedown of a blog / post featured

Hey there! If something's wrong, please let us know opening an issue and we'll sort it out as soon as possible.

What tech did you use to build this?

• Eleventy: The website itself
• Open Iconic: Icons
• Oxipng: PNG image compression
• feedme: Parsing feeds

License

hullblogs.com is released under the Apache Licence 2.0. The full license text is included in the LICENSE file in this repository. Tldr legal have a great summary of the license if you're interested.