Editing the Schedules

The PLSE webpages are stored in Github, and pushing to that repository publishes the webpages. If you don’t have access to the repository, ask one of the admins to give you access.

Schedule pages

The meet/ folder contains schedules for our various group meetings and reading groups. Each group meeting using the template lives in a separate folder (e.g, plrg for 590P). Within a folder, each quarter gets a new file (e.g., plrg/18wi.md for the Winter 2018 instance of 590P). There’s also a single calendar.ics in each folder, so that people can subscribe once per group, rather than resubscribing every quarter.

Adding an event

The schedule data lives in the YAML front matter in a Markdown file such as plrg/15au.md. Here is a complete definition of an event in YAML (everything except date and what is optional):

  - date: Oct 9 2017
    who: Leslie Lamport
    what: "The Part-Time Parliament: a reflection"
    link: "https://doi.org/10.1145/279227.279229"
    extra: This is the Paxos paper!
    starttime: 2:30pm
    endtime: 3:20pm
    room: CSE 403

Some important notes about the file format:

• YAML gets confused when you use colons (:) in unquoted values. That’s why the what in this example is quoted. You should probably just put quotes around every field.
• who, what, and extra are all Markdown-ified on the web page (but, of course, not on the generated calendars).
• It’s important to include a year in date—otherwise, every event will be given the current year at build time, which will confuse people’s calendars.

Cancelling an event

You could just delete an event from the list. But then there won’t be a row on the webpage explaining why it’s cancelled, which some people like. To put such a row on the page, but not generate a calendar event, use an en- or em-dash as who, or use the words “No meeting” in what (case sensitive).

Multiple events/links in one meeting

You might want to include multiple links in a single event. (For example, perhaps you’re presenting two papers in the same meeting.) To do this, add the second (and third, and …) link to the extra field using Markdown, like so:

  - date: Oct 9
    who: Leslie Lamport
    what: "The Part-Time Parliament: a reflection"
    link: "http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/lamport-paxos.pdf"
    extra: "Also read [The Byzantine Generals Problem](http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/um/people/lamport/pubs/byz.pdf)"

Possible fields

• who is the speaker’s name and affiliation
• what is the event description
• link is a link (use it for, e.g., papers for a reading group). On the webpage, the what text will be linked to this URL. On the calendar, the URL will appear in event descriptions.
• extra is some extra text that appears below the what on the webpage, and does not appear on the calendar. It doesn’t use the link, and is Markdown-ified, so you can use it to add other links to an event.
• starttime overrides the schedule’s start time for a particular event.
• endtime overrides the schedule’s end time for a particular event.
• room overrides the schedule’s room for a particular event.

Adding a new schedule

Duplicate an existing quarter’s file (e.g., 15au.md). You’ll want to customize the metadata at the top of the new file. Here’s what those fields do:

• title is the title used on the webpage
• subtitle is a subtitle used on the webpage
• shortname is a short name that appears as the prefix for events on the calendar. For example, you might use “590P” as the shortname, so that the titles of events in the generated calendar look like “590P: A Part-Time Parliament”.
• quarter is the quarter used on the webpage
• day is the day used on the webpage (not used for calendar events)
• starttime is the start time for events on this schedule.
• endtime is the end time for events on this schedule.
• room is the location for events on this schedule.
• who_in_summary is a boolean that controls the titles of events in the generated calendar. If true, they include the presenter’s name, and look like: “590P: Leslie Lamport: A Part-Time Parliament”. If false, they exclude the presenter’s name.
• layout: schedule is Jekyll-speak to select the right template for all this other stuff to work.

To create a whole new group meeting, duplicate an entire folder.