lr-notebook/

Individual notebooks for each lab member

2016-02-14

Background

Continuing to work on new lektor-based notebook system for the lab!!!!

I've used the following for notebooks:

per-group mediawiki instance, per-user accounts
- pros: everyone's work in one place
- cons: hard to enforce organization, lacks portability, scales poorly over time
per-user mediawiki instance
- pros: more similar to individual paper notebooks, more portable
- cons: poor group-wide indexing, search. collaboration is hard.
per-project git repo, with per-user branches
- pros: benefits of git version control: diffs, lots of git(hub) integrations available
- cons: any group-wide indexing requires constent, burdensome merging

Next stage in notebook evolution is:

per-user git repo using lektor (static+cms+framework), plus group-wide indexing
- pros: combined benefits of per-user notebooks with automatic per-project indexing, and git-based version control
- cons: tbd; requires some work to set up

I'm currently favoring the following folder layout and repo naming convention

notebooks/
  all/
  nb-docs/
  nb-han/
  nb-pablo/
  nb-parsa/
  nb-mia/
  nb-shawn/
  nb-suraj/
  nb-tural/

nb-* is an individual git repo containing a lektor notebook
all is a customized lektor notebook (perhaps with some scripts or symlinks) that builds a master index of sibling notebooks.
nb-docs will store general lab information (currently on the wiki)

Clean up prototype lektor notebook

I originally structured the root of this notebook to be a sub-folder of a git repo. But we want the notebook to move up to the top-level folder of its repo.

Some of the html templates are hard-coded with my name, project name etc. Needed to go into the lektor source code to figure out what the lektor.environment.Config object contained. After taking a look at environment.py, it turns out we can access the project name variable in a template using {{config.PROJECT.name}} so I added that to the layout.html template.

Ongoing CSS Tweaks

Still not happy with all the spacing and formatting of skeleton.css. First I wanted to get header sizes to look more reasonable for log-entry pages. Here are current skeleton.css values:

h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6 {
  font-family: "Anonymous Pro", "HelveticaNeue", "Helvetica Neue", Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif;
  margin-top: 0;
  margin-bottom: 2rem;
  font-weight: 300; }
h1 { font-size: 2.0rem; line-height: 1.2;  letter-spacing: -.1rem;}
h2 { font-size: 1.8rem; line-height: 1.25; letter-spacing: -.1rem; }
h3 { font-size: 1.5rem; line-height: 1.3;  letter-spacing: -.1rem; }
h4 { font-size: 1.2rem; line-height: 1.35; letter-spacing: -.08rem; }
h5 { font-size: 1.1rem; line-height: 1.5;  letter-spacing: -.05rem; }
h6 { font-size: 1.0rem; line-height: 1.6;  letter-spacing: 0; }

/* Larger than phablet */
@media (min-width: 550px) {
  h1 { font-size: 5.0rem; }
  h2 { font-size: 4.2rem; }
  h3 { font-size: 3.6rem; }
  h4 { font-size: 3.0rem; }
  h5 { font-size: 2.4rem; }
  h6 { font-size: 1.5rem; }
}

Here are some updated values.

h1 { font-size: 2.8rem; line-height: 1.2;  letter-spacing: -.1rem;}
h2 { font-size: 2.4rem; line-height: 1.25; letter-spacing: -.1rem; }
h3 { font-size: 2.0rem; line-height: 1.3;  letter-spacing: -.1rem; }
h4 { font-size: 1.6rem; line-height: 1.35; letter-spacing: -.08rem; }
h5 { font-size: 1.2rem; line-height: 1.5;  letter-spacing: -.05rem; }
h6 { font-size: 1.0rem; line-height: 1.6;  letter-spacing: 0; }

/* Larger than phablet */
@media (min-width: 550px) {
  h1 { font-size: 4.0rem; }
  h2 { font-size: 3.6rem; }
  h3 { font-size: 3.3rem; }
  h4 { font-size: 3.0rem; }
  h5 { font-size: 2.5rem; }
  h6 { font-size: 1.5rem; }
}

I also updated code with the following:

color: #cc3366;
display: inline-block;

inline-block means that the width of the fenced code blocks does not extend all the way to the edge of the div.

Sublime Markdown Syntax Highlighting

These look promising:

I'm still happy with Monokai-Midnight for default editing "color_scheme": "Packages/Colorsublime - Themes/Monokai-Midnight.tmTheme",

For markdown I've been using Hammer:

{
  "color_scheme": "Packages/Colorsublime - Themes/Hammer.tmTheme",
  "dictionary": "Packages/Language - English/en_US.dic",
  "extensions":
  [
    "markdown",
    "md",
    "lr",
    "markdown"
  ],
  "font_size": 20,
  "ignored_packages":
  [
    "Vintage"
  ],
  "spell_check": true,
  "trim_trailing_white_space_on_save": true
}

I would like to eventually get code-fence highlighting to work with sublime-markdown-extended, but with something like Hammer instead of Monokai for outside code blocks.