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1. State of the art, project management and documentation

Research & Ideation

I have worked on web design before using wildly different workflows. I have built sites from scratch and even used templates before. For this documentation I decided to get out of my comfort zone so I decided to use the Web IDE as opposed to Brackets (which I normally use).

I already had a fablab.io account and have used gitlab, github and git before so getting started was straight forward.

I still pulled a local copy of my repository as I think it will make handling files and images easier. I also took note of the images and video guidelines i.e.

  • Images to be less than 100kb
  • Videos to be less than 10mb

For the images I will be using Gimp to make any pre-resize edits, Imagemagick nautilus plugin to resize the images and tinypng to optimize the images for web use. As for videos I will be using Youtube.

References & Inspiration

I have worked with Markdown before but needed to do a little brush-up on syntax and the rest. For reference I have bookmarked a few sites and will be using them for reference:

  1. Github Docs
  2. Geeksforgeeks
  3. Daring Fireball (gotten from MkDocs documentation)

I followed the MkDocs Setup link in the mkdocs.yml file to see if I could implement any tweaks.

I implemented automatic theme change and changed the font. I hope nothing breaks...

I also got inspiration from Stephanie Vilayphiou - GreenLab and using the documentation on the Lightbox plugin tried implementing and customizing the image zoom plugin.

Tools

Template Modifications

I edited the mkdocs.yml file to implement the following changes

  1. Theme colour
  2. Automatic theme change
  3. Code syntax highlighting
  4. Code copy and selection button
  5. Tasklists

Documentation workflow

For this week's assignement I generated my documentation workflow.

Step 1

Make sure that all the repositories are synced starting with the Web-IDE.

Push and Commit Web-IDE changes.

Step 2

Sync the local repo with the remote one, transfer relevant files to the relevant folders and push changes to remote

From the repo directory:

git pull
cp ../Assignments/Assignment.../images/*resized.jpeg docs/images
cp ../Assignments/Assignment.../files/... docs/files/
git status
git commit -m "added week... files"
git push

Step 3

Reload Web-IDE to reflect changes.

Step 4

Document the week's activities adding files, images and videos where necessary.

Week 01 - Summary

  • Build a documentation website describing you and your motivation for the textile-academy, including your previous work
  • Upload the documentation to your project page on class.textile-academy.org
  • Add references and research based on the topic of your interest
  • Learn how to upload images, videos, references and how to use Markdown and Gitlab
  • Learn about the fab lab processes, booking system, usage, machine demos, tools and safety rules
  • Customize your website and document how you did it (extra credit)