Before making edits to the website please read these important reminders

News, events, and Other Posts


Overview

The “posts” mechanism powers all regularly updated items except seminar talks (those a powered by google calendars, see here for details). Examples of these include:

  • Event announcements (such as graduation)
  • Conference announcements
  • Award announcements
  • Job opportunities
  • IMS lecture announcements
  • Any other department news

Each post corresponds to a file located in the _posts/ folder or one of its subfolders (subfolders in _posts/ are there purely for convenience and do not affect the resulting website). The file has a certain structure described below. The filename has to follow an exact pattern, namely, it must look like

YYYY-MM-DD-name-of-the-post.md

Here YYYY-MM-DD better correspond to date: configuration variable in the post. The post itself has its own page. By default, its address is formatted as https://math.virginia.edu/YYYY/MM/name-of-the-post, where YYYY, MM, and name-of-the-post come from the file name. This default address can be changed by setting the permalink: configuration variable.


Post file

Example of a post file

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---
layout: post
title: Benedict Gross - Virginia Mathematics Lectures - March 27-29, 2017
date: 2017-03-27 13:30:00
event-date: 2017-03-27 13:30:00
multi-day-event: true
permalink: /ims/lectures/benedict-gross/
comments: false
categories: news virginia-mathematics-lectures ims events
published: true
image: __SITE_URL__/img/IMS/Gross_poster.jpg
image-alt: Benedict H. Gross Poster
image-address: __SITE_URL__/img/IMS/Gross_poster.jpg
image-tall: true
more-text: Abstracts
nav_parent: IMS
---

<h3 class="mt-3 mb-4"> Benedict H. Gross (Harvard)</h3>

- Lecture 1: The rank of elliptic curves
- Lecture 2: The arithmetic of hyperelliptic curves
- Lecture 3: Heegner points on modular curves

<!--more-->

#### Lecture 1: The rank of elliptic curves

[FURTHER_CONTENT]

Content

The first 17 lines define many configuration variables for the post. The rest of the file (after the second ---) is the content of the post. Note the separator <!--more-->. The content above it is the post excerpt which is displayed in all post rolls, and the content below it is displayed only on the page of the post, cf. the post roll and a page of the post.

One image to the post can be added to be handled automatically (to be displayed in nice size in both post rolls and on the post page). More images can be added manually as needed, both above and below the excerpt separator.

The syntax of the content (both above and below the excerpt separator) is markdown. Math formulas are also supported. As usual, plain HTML is supported inside markdown.

Configuration variables

Let us now describe the configuration variables (not all of them are present above), and how they affect the presentation of the post.

published

[update: April 24, 2018]
The setting published: false appears to be broken in a new version of Jekyll, so please manually move the source files to a special folder /_UNPUBLISHED/ in the source

Setting published: false will remove the post from the website completely (but it will stay in the GitHub source). By default this variable is set to published: true, so it can as well be omitted.

layout

Should be set to layout: post, simple as that. By the way, the post layout _layouts/post.html determines how the individual post page looks like.

comments

The comments feature is not yet implemented, but if it will be implemented then comments: false will disable comments (this will be the default setting), and only manually setting comments: true will enable comments. Therefore, this variable can simply be not present in posts.

title

Well, this is the title of the post which is displayed in both post rolls and on the post page.

date

This is the published date of the post which may not coincide with the actual date of the event. It should coincide with the date in the filename of the post .md file. It is also displayed as “date published” at the bottom of the post page

Note. The date (and event-date below) should be formatted with hours, minutes and seconds, as in date: 2017-03-27 13:30:00. Hours, minutes, and seconds are displayed nowhere, and they are used only to determine the ordering of the posts when they are shown in a roll.

event-date and multi-day-event

These two variables allow to indicate the date of an event, if a post is announcing an event such as IMS lectures or a conference. If the post is not about an event, simply do not include these variables.

The value event-date is displayed under the title of the post. If multi-day-event is set to true, the text before the date says “Event start date”, otherwise the text says “Event date”.

permalink

If you do not like the default address https://math.virginia.edu/YYYY/MM/name-of-the-post of the post page, you can manually set it to something else, as in permalink: /ims/lectures/benedict-gross/. You can include any subfolder names in the permalink.

categories

This is an important variable because it determines where the post is displayed. The currently used categories on the website are (the list below is generated automatically), to give an idea of standard post categories:

  • awards
  • awm
  • conferences
  • defenses
  • events
  • ims
  • ims-special
  • jobs
  • major-news
  • news
  • swiper-news
  • virginia-math-bulletin
  • virginia-mathematics-lectures

A post can have several categories.

By default, all published posts (i.e., not with published: false) are displayed on the “all news” page. If you add news, then the post will be displayed on the main page (note that the main page displays only 5 most recent posts). And so on, see below for a detailed description.

hide-this-item

Setting hide-this-item: true will hide the news item from the main page, even if it is not yet pushed back by newer news items. This can be handy for some small news once the time passes. However, this key does not hide this news item from the general news roll at https://math.virginia.edu/allnews/. By agreement, major news will not be hidden like this, only the ordinary news.

more-text

This is the text on the “more” button at the bottom of the post excerpt, which can be configured to make more sense. For example, for IMS lectures it can say “Abstracts”, for Virginia Math Bulletin it can say “Start reading”, and so on. If this is not defined, then the text at the bottom of the post excerpt says simply “View details”.

nav_parent

This variable is specific to the IMS lectures (and typically should not be used for any other posts). It is used to highlight the IMS navigation bar item which clearly corresponds to the IMS lectures. See here for details on how pages interact with the navigation bar.

variables related to post image

Posts look nicely with images. One image to the post can be added to be handled automatically (to be displayed in nice size in both post rolls and on the post page). The variables image, image-alt, image-address, image-tall, and image-wide determine how this image is handled. More images can be added manually as needed, both above and below the excerpt separator.

If you do not want an automatically handled image in the post, simply omit these image variables.

image

Put the image file into the folder /img/news_events/ or simply into /img/ in the source code (or a proper another subfolder of /img/, or even into a different subfolder like it is done for the math bulletin; the only desire is that this should be more or less consistent). Link the image in the post file like this: image: __SITE_URL__/img/IMS/Gross_poster.jpg.

Important! keep the __SITE_URL__ prefix as is, this is needed for correct automatic generation of the website.

image-alt

This is the alternative text and title of the image. This can be empty, but better to put there something informative, maybe also even the title of the post.

image-address

This is a link to where a click on the image leads. If no link address is provided, then by default the link address is the address of the post page. However, sometimes it makes sense to have a link to an external resource or to a PDF or a larger copy of the image. In case of internal links, use the __SITE_URL__ prefix in the addresses, as in the image variable.

image-tall and image-wide

If the image is wide and can occupy a wider part of the post excerpt, then set image-wide: true. If the image is tall and normally takes too much vertical space, then set image-tall: true. How these variables is handled is specific to each post roll, and this can be easily configured. These variables are very optional, and should not be included for more or less square images.


Where posts are displayed

The posts are automatically displayed in a number of pages, including the following.

Note. This information is current as of May 14, 2017, and more pages displaying posts might have been added.

Department main page

The main department page https://math.virginia.edu displays up to 5 posts with category news. If a post does not have category news then it will not be displayed on the main page. Most posts thus should have category news.

If among the posts displayed on the main page there is a post with category major-news, then it is displayed on top with a larger picture. Only one major-news will be displayed like this, even if there are several such posts on the main page. If one wants to highlight a particular post then one should add major-news category to it, and remove this category from the other posts on the main page. The major-news category only affects posts displayed on the main page.

“All news” page

This page collects and displays all posts on the website, and features “pagination”, i.e., creates pages which show 8 posts each, with navigation on the right. The subsequent pages have addresses like https://math.virginia.edu/allnews/page2/. Even if a post does not have category news it will be displayed here. To remove a post from the website set the configuration variable published: false.

Pages displaying posts by category

These pages are displaying every post having a certain category. They do not have the “pagination”, that is, they can grow up to dozens of entries over time. This issue will be addressed in the future as needed. One possible immediate solution is to have an archive category or a configuration variable, and not display archived posts there.

Again, even if a post does not have category news it will be displayed in the corresponding page below if it has a suitable category. To remove a post from the website set the configuration variable published: false.

IMS lectures

This page has some general information on the IMS Virginia Mathematics Lectures, and also an archive of all the IMS lectures posts. Posts having category virginia-mathematics-lectures appear there.

Virginia math Bulletin

This page collects issues of Virginia Math Bulletin. Posts having category virginia-math-bulletin appear there.

Awards

This page collects information on awards in the department (both faculty and student). Posts having category awards appear there.

Conferences

This page collects conference announcements. Posts having category conferences appear there.

Job opportunities

This page collects postings of job opportunities. Posts having category jobs appear there.