/menus

This essay is an analysis of 693 restaurant menus in seven American Chinatowns, of what the words “Chinese food” really mean and represent

Primary LanguageJupyter NotebookMIT LicenseMIT

Development

Run gulp to fire up the project server.

Any changes to the src/ folder will trigger live reload.

HTML

Where it goes: src/html/partials/story/.

The main HTML file ins src/html/index.hbs. Generally speaking, You should mostly just include new partials in there and not modify too much of it since there are a bunch of presets.

Partials are not automatically included. You must add them to index.hbs. If you created a new file content.hbs it would be referenced as {{> story/content }}.

Metadata

Fill out template-data/meta.json

Copy

Using a Google Doc for copy is recommended. We use ArchieML as a micro CMS.

Setup Google Doc

  • Create a Google Doc
  • Click Share button -> advanced -> Change... -> to "Anyone with this link"
  • In the address bar, grab the ID - eg. ...com/document/d/1IiA5a5iCjbjOYvZVgPcjGzMy5PyfCzpPF-LnQdCdFI0/edit
  • In the file config.json in root of project, paste in the ID

Running gulp fetch-google at any point (even in new tab while server is running) will pull down the latest, and output a file template-data/copy.json.

You can now reference the JSON in your HTML, namespaced by copy (eg. <p>{{copy.explanation}}</p>).

SVG Icons

There is a directory called svg in the root of project, it contains a bunch of icons. To include them in the HTML, simply do this:

<div>@@include('arrow-left.svg')</div>

This way you can drop in svg icons anywhere in your HTML code whilst keeping it uncluttered.

JavaScript

Where it goes: src/js/

Take a look at entry.js. This is the kickoff file, the only one included and run automatically.

Then take a look at graphic.js, it has some basic skeleton stuff setup for you. This is imported and called from entry.js once on load, and subsequently on a debounced resize event. I recommend putting your code in here. If you want to create more files, I recommending doing that in graphic.js, but remember they won't be executed until you import them.

D3 Jetpack is included globally by default. For any other libraries, it is recommend that you use npm to install and import them. You can also do it the vanilla way by including them in the src/assets folder and putting a script tag in the HTML.

The JavaScript is transpiled from ES6, and uses Webpack to bundle into a single file. That means each file creates its own closure, so a "global" variable is scoped to a file unless you declare it as window.variable = .....

JavaScript Utilties

In the folder src/js/utils there a are a bunch of handy helper JS functions.

  • dom.js: Super minimial wrapper on basic vanilla dom selection for convenience and cross-browser.
  • is-mobile.js: Device sniffing to detect if on mobile hardware.
  • load-image.js: Async image loading to detect when image completely loaded.
  • locate.js: Estimate user location via ip address.
  • truncate.js: Truncate string with options to break on space and add ellipses.
  • url-parameter.js: Get and set the paremeters of the URL in address bar.
  • lookup-state-name.js: Get state name from state abbrevation.
  • lookup-state-abbr.js: Get state abbrevation from state name.
  • tracker.js: Fire simple GA tracking on events.

The Pudding's Favorite Libraries

CSS

Where it goes: src/css/story/.

There is a file for you to start off with, story.styl. You can create as many files as you want in this directory, they are automatically included.

Checkout some of the auto-included files in src/css/utils/ (variables.styl, helpers.styl, presets.styl). You can modify these, especially variables.styl.

Fonts

Fonts are loaded async and use the FOUT practice. We have three font families:

  • Canela (class name: tk-canela)
  • Publico (class name: tk-publico)
  • Atlas Grotesk (class name: tk-atlas)

Simply include the class on the element, and all children will inherit it. Publico is included on the body tag by default.

Example:

<div class='example'>
	<p class='tk-atlas'>test</p>
</div>

Use the font-weight CSS property to per-usual. Available weights:

  • Canela: 300, 700
  • Publico: 400, 700
  • Atlas: 400, 500, 600

Assets

Where it goes: src/assets/

I reccommend creating separate directories for images, data, etc. Assets can always be referenced relative to assets directory. For example:

  • <img src='assets/img/test.jpg'>
  • d3.csv('assets/data/test.csv')

Deploy

Run gulp dist

This generates a single html file with inlined css, a single js file, and a folder with assets in the dist folder.

Update Github Pages version (during development)

Run make github (make sure you've enabled github pages in your repo settings to pull from docs).

Update The Pudding version (launch)

Requirements:

In Makefile, replace year/month/name with your own (eg. 2017/01/nba). Uncomment code.

Run make live to deploy and bust cache. If you only made changes to html/css/js, you can run make aws-htmljs then make aws-cache (it will be much quicker than re-uploading all your assets).

Pre-launch Checklist

  • optimize images: make sure they aren't unncessarily large in dimensions (should be no more than 2x their final rendered dimensions), should also crunched with something like imageoptim.
  • clean data: reduce filesize bloat by making sure you aren't loading unnecessary columns and rows.
  • remove console logs: aesthetics 😄
  • enable anayltics: be sure analytics partial is included (analytics.hbs)
  • fill out metadata: template-data/meta.json
  • create two social images: _ Facebook: 1200 x 628 (src/assets/social/social-facebook.jpg) _ Twitter: 1024 x 576 (src/assets/social/social-twitter.jpg)