opentwincities / opentwincities.github.com Goto Github PK

Maybe in the hero area, or under the fold.

On May 1st, Github is removing the ability for Pages to use any parser besides kramdown. Last week I tried using kramdown on opentwincities.org, but I've found a number of parsing errors (mostly in headers and links), and have now reverted the site to use the parser we were using, redcarpet.

By May 1st, we should switch back to using kramdown, and change any breaking Markdown we come across.

Create a page that describes the benefits working with Open Twin Cities provides - collaboration with residents, getting input, ideation, facilitated design, etc...

When navigating to https://opentwincities.org page looks goofy and console shows the following:

(index):1 Mixed Content: The page at 'https://www.opentwincities.org/about/code-of-conduct/' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure script 'http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/foundation/5.1.1/js/vendor/modernizr.min.js'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.
(index):1 Mixed Content: The page at 'https://www.opentwincities.org/about/code-of-conduct/' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure script 'http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/foundation/5.1.1/js/foundation.min.js'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.
(index):1 Mixed Content: The page at 'https://www.opentwincities.org/about/code-of-conduct/' was loaded over HTTPS, but requested an insecure script 'http://cdnjs.cloudflare.com/ajax/libs/foundation/5.1.1/js/foundation/foundation.topbar.min.js'. This request has been blocked; the content must be served over HTTPS.```

instructions to recreate

1. https://www.opentwincities.org/events/2019/08/13/otc-special-connection-visit-from-open-world-ukraine/
2. Click RSVP (http://www.meetup.com/OpenTwinCities/events/263961162/)
3. Note error "Invalid Authorization Request" in popup https://secure.meetup.com/oauth2/authorize?client_id=ubgk5cl7d1eprsbrm1r3iqoatb&response_type=token&state=ev-263961162,1&scope=ageless&redirect_uri=https://www.opentwincities.org/events/2019/08/13/otc-special-connection-visit-from-open-world-ukraine/

information

Operation succeeds when user starts from http (vs. https) page (https://www.opentwincities.org/events/2019/08/13/otc-special-connection-visit-from-open-world-ukraine/).

speculation

May have to authorize https://www.opentwincities.com in addition to http://www.opentwincities.com redirect_url on the Meetup side.

Tim Leisio has created a new design (discussion, mockup, and links) for OpenTwinCities.org, as well as an HTML/CSS prototype (repository; live demo).

Based on this great work, we should implement this new design on opentwincities.org. An initial thought on this project is that it should mostly require modifying existing HTML templates and CSS, since the site runs on GitHub Pages (Jekyll), and is thus entirely template driven.

CfAPI is pretty cool, and Open Twin Cities is feeding content into it. For example, a list of active OTC projects is available at http://codeforamerica.org/api/organizations/Open-Twin-Cities/projects .

For the sake of organization and reusing resources, let's fetch content from the CfAPI for the project listings on opentwincities.org. This should be a pretty easy implementation:

1. GET http://codeforamerica.org/api/organizations/Open-Twin-Cities/projects
2. For each element returned, create a DOM element that includes the project name, description, code url, and link url if available.
3. Insert created DOM elements into the page.

The OTC projects included in the CfAPI Projects endpoint are defined in this Google Spreadsheet

OTC's Google Group and MailChimp list are pretty important for supporting civic tech discussion and letting people know about news and events. So it goes that the site should make it really easy for people to signup for these if they want to.

It's pretty easy to embed a signup form for a Googe Group.

It's also quite easy to embed a MailChimp subscription form.

Because we're potentially presenting the user with two fields to enter the same information for pretty similar actions, its worth considering how to minimize confusion and redundancy. Is it possible to have the user enter their email once, ask them which of these things they want to sign up for, and have the page submit to Google/MailChimp appropriately?

https://opendata.ramseycounty.us

opentwincities.org is a blog, so it would be nice if it had an RSS feed for posts. Drew Inglis has some ideas on how to make that happen.

I already reported this at OpenTwinCities/otc-getting-started#2 but I see this repo has a bit more activity so creating a duplicate. ;)

The link on the home page to join the Slack server leads to an error.

An error occurred in the application and your page could not be served. If you are the application owner, check your logs for details. You can do this from the Heroku CLI with the command
heroku logs --tail

Now that we have a Slackin (https://otc-slackin.azurewebsites.net/), we should show that on the site.

Thanks to Code for America, OTC has access to some significant donated online hosting from AWS, Azure, and Digital Ocean. Now the question is, how do people in the Twin Cities make use of this hosting? How do they indicate they have something that could use hosting support?

An embedded Google Form is a simple way to help with this.

Basically, versions of http://www.opentwincities.org/events/ and http://www.opentwincities.org/events/previous/ that only return JSON. This could be used by some JavaScript to create a more compact display of events.

I think the Socrata Community Data Portal might be our best/easiest way to manage datasets. So, we should link to it.

https://communities.socrata.com/catalog/open-twin-cities/

In the spirit of open source and reuse, OpenTwinCities.org should really have a copyleft license on it's content, like a Creative Commons 4.0 Attribution license.

Adding this license is pretty easy. But first, I need to make sure that everybody who has authored content on this site is OK with using this license.

The What's New section of the homepage currently displays all blog posts on the site. As time goes on and more posts get put up, this listing is getting out of control. If an endpoint existed that returned this information in JSON (and could pull out event posts), JavaScript could render this part of the page and dynamically display the appropriate entries.

http://www.opentwincities.org/

At the moment, it does not appear to be possible to RSVP for a meetup via the RSVP button on an event's page on opentwincities.org. The first click on the button does properly ask the user to log in to Meetup, and seems to successfully log the user in. However, subsequent clicks do not open meetup/registration info.

Good afternoon,

The project links on the front page are pulling up a GitHub-branded 404 error (attached screenie.)

http://www.opentwincities.org/pages/projects/

and ensuing in-page anchors for that address.

Cheers,

Sean

We don't post to Twitter or Facebook, and haven't for several years

We have lot of events beyond the monthly meetups. Let's use the header space where we highlight the monthly meetups to instead highlight the next event that's happening. That way all events get highlighted at some point, and people don't have to figure out how to get to the next event.

Keeping track of and managing projects has been an issue for Open Twin Cities since the beginning (hence ticket #1 being about project listing). This year we've been exploring this issue as part of a broader effort to help members of OTC who want to find out how to get involved with the community and civic technology.

@themightychris has setup stage and production instances of Laddr for OTC. Laddr is a platform that Code for Philly has created for Brigades that has some really great features related to projects. Each project has it's own space for describing the project and activities related to the project; people can become members of a project; projects have a life cycle (initial idea, prototyping, hibernating, etc...); projects can be searched and browsed by various tags (issue area, technology used, etc...).

I think it would be really good to put a few of the projects currently listed on the Projects page into http://otc-staging.poplar.phl.io/, and start poking around Laddr to see what we like.

On the mobile site when you click the button 'show list of locations' and are viewing the list as the button state has changed to 'hide list of locations', if you change how the list of locations is sorted using the drop down 'sort by' option, after the sorting preferences update the button goes back to saying 'show list of locations'. It doesn't revert back to the correct 'hide list of locations' if you change the sorting option to your previous choice so I think it's just when the sort option changes the button doesn't stay on 'hide list of locations' no matter what. Not a huge deal as you can still click the button to get back to the map and it just continues to say 'show list of locations' until you click again from the map.

Attached image examples below if the explanation is confusing (which it probably is, apologies!)

http://opentwincities.org/2013/11/14/citycampmn-2013-recap/

In my conversion of posts to Markdown, I've broken something in this post. There should be more content that follows the slideshow.

In addition, the slideshow is displaying the wrong images; it seems to be displaying all of Tim Erickson's pictures.

Google PageSpeed suggests compressing the following images to speed up the site:

• Losslessly compressing http://opentwincities.org/images/design/hero_blocks.png could save 28.7KiB (41% reduction).
• Losslessly compressing http://opentwincities.org/images/logos/otc/logo_bg_512.png could save 6.8KiB (25% reduction).
• Losslessly compressing http://opentwincities.org/images/logos/otc/otc-o64.png could save 3.5KiB (62% reduction).
• Losslessly compressing http://opentwincities.org/images/logos/otc/otc-o32.png could save 3KiB (72% reduction).
• Losslessly compressing http://opentwincities.org/images/logos/sponsors/devjam.png could save 2.6KiB (17% reduction).
• Losslessly compressing http://opentwincities.org/…ages/logos/partners/CfA_Brigade_logo.png could save 2.6KiB (18% reduction).
• Losslessly compressing http://opentwincities.org/images/posts/2014/07/hackdformnm.png could save 2.6KiB (12% reduction).
• Losslessly compressing http://opentwincities.org/images/logos/sponsors/startribune.gif could save 1.4KiB (15% reduction).

A couple of people are interested in digging into the Google Analytics we have on opentwincities.org, and in particular setting up a goal in GA. Having people sign-up for the newsletter is a pretty good goal, so lets add something to the sign-up button to make GA track that: https://developers.google.com/analytics/devguides/collection/analyticsjs/events

The homepage currently lists every blog post, which is becoming really long. It should only list a fixed number of the newest posts.

I think this gets done in Namecheap:
https://www.namecheap.com/support/knowledgebase/article.aspx/9770/38/how-to-use-htaccess-to-redirect-to-https-in-cpanel

The site currently has our Mission and Goals, but it would be useful to have a more general About Us page on the site that tells visitors what we actually do (meetups, events, consulting on open data and tech projects), services we can be hired to perform, and who the core OTC team is. Might also be a good place to add our event code of conduct, and a list of past media mentions.

1. Using tools like https://wave.webaim.org/report check site's pages for accessibility compliance.
2. Document these issues so they can be addressed.

Resources

• https://www.usability.gov/what-and-why/accessibility.html
• https://developer.mozilla.org/en-US/docs/Web/Accessibility/Understanding_WCAG

... with content for the various kinds of volunteer work available

Create a page highlighting some successful projects and events that OTC has been involved in. Doesn't have to be comprehensive or long (in fact, it's probably better not to).

Open Twin Cities currently relies on GiveMN.org to accept online donations. During yesterday's Give to the Max Day, that site experienced significant technical problems that prevented people from being able to contribute to Open Twin Cities. This has happened in the past (IIRC, the last three or four Give to the Max Days have seen significant technical problems).

We should build a contribution page on opentwincities.org. The advantages to doing this would be:

• Multiple methods for contributors to make contributions - we could continue to have our page on GiveMN, which would provide us with redundancy in the event of a problem
• Far more control over content and branding on the contributions page

Using off the shelf libraries and services, it is possible to build a simple donation form on opentwincities.org, similar to https://marnitastable.org/contribute/ .

Jekyll now supports sorting by specified attributes. This should enable OTC events to specify a date field for the event that is separate from the date of the post (the date that the post is published).

• date - Date the post is published
• event_date - Datetime that the event will take place

With these two fields, we can display event posts in different ways on different pages. This will allow OTC to display an event post in the regular stream of posts, positioned based on the date of publishing; and to display an event post on the event listing page and event rss feed, positioned based on the date the event will take place. This would also make it much easier to implement #17

I believe that actually implementing this will take 4 steps:

• Add an event_date field to all current event posts. For simplicity, just set the event_date field of existing events to be the same as the current date field of those events. I think this calls for a script.
• Update the event listing pages/feed so they sort event posts by event_date using the sort filter.
• Push and Profit

• OS: Manjaro 22.0.0
• rvm 1.29.12

After I clone the fork and cd to the directory, I get the message

Required ruby-2.6.6 is not installed.
To install do: 'rvm install "ruby-2.6.6"'

So I enter that in, and after a few minutes, make fails with an error (logs attached)
configure.log
make.log
postconfigure.log

Cause it would probably help to know how many people are visiting the site.

The templates for articles and events (perhaps all pages?) on opentwincities.org set head tags so that Facebook/Twitter/Google +/whateversocialmediasite can display an image and description of content when these pages are shared on social media. This can help to entice people to checkout the site, since the shared page will look nice on social media pages.

Unfortuantely, right now some social media sites can not read these tags for various reasons.

• Facebook complains about an HTTP Redirect
• Twitter reports an invalid card type

Fortunately, Google+ seems to be happy

Our MailChimp list has almost 500 people who want to be informed about civic tech news and events. That's exactly what we post to opentwincities.org, so we should start feeding opentwincities.org posts to the MailChimp list.

There are RSS feeds of all posts and just events that we can use to feed a MailChimp campaign.

One complicating factor is how the site treats events. Events are a category of posts that are dated to the day of the event (i.e. the Event post for Hack for MN 2014 is dated June 21st, 2014, the first day of Hack for MN 2014). All other posts are dated to whenever the post is actually published. On the site, and in the RSS feed, Event posts mix with regular posts, are are sorted by date. This means that event posts often show up at the top, since they are often in the future, and it is quite common for the front page of opentwincities.org to have multiple up coming events listed at the top of latest posts, pushing down 'newer' general posts (posts that have actually been published more recently).

This prompts a few questions:

1. How does MailChimp handle this? Will it include future event posts in emails? Does that mean subscribers will receive an email everyday with the event post until the event occurs?
2. More generally (for the MailChimp list and the site), is there a better way to notify users/subscribers about events? There's a certain convenience for us as content creators, and for people following OTC, to having Event posts included with general posts, creating one stream for updates of all types. But, as mentioned above, this causes events to overshadow new content. It also doesn't do much to differentiate events in a list of all posts.

We should have a more complete list of projects and ideas that have been discussed or worked on at Open Twin Cities meetings or events.

My idea is to use a Google Spreadsheet to act as a data store, then simply display this on a page on the opentwincities.org site. We can easily use Tabletop.js to get data from the Google Spreadsheet as well a template system like that including in Underscore.js to make it look good.

I have started a basic spreadsheet here:
https://docs.google.com/a/opentwincities.org/spreadsheet/ccc?key=0AoH-VJHQACf4dEhkNTgtdG1PRlduYnRLd2g4clBaWWc

I am not sure what is the most appropriate way to handle input. I think having it editable by anyone could end up a bit bad, but we don't want to be gate keepers for it. We could also look at a mix of editing directly and Google Form submissions. Ideas?

Going to the MetroGIS committee meeting was a great way to learn about what the committee is doing and to introduce Open Twin Cities to the committee. Meetings like this are held by various agencies through out the Cities, and are generally open to the public. I think it would be helpful to use a Google Calendar to simply note when meetings like this, or other events OTC members would be interested in, are happening.

The sites below used to get Meetup events posted to them automatically, but the 09/12/19 Ukraine event is the last one to have posted. Figure out why this stopped working and see if we can get it working again.

• https://www.opentwincities.org/events/
• https://www.opentwincities.org/posts/
• https://www.opentwincities.org

Looking for feedback on content, layout, etc.

• what's hard to find?
• what's missing?
• what's obsolete?

• Move the contents of the community partnerships and government partnerships pages to the projects page
• Remove the community partnerships and government partnerships pages