The Aqua Jump Eclipse 200 delivers 124 square feet of bouncy, bouncy, bouncy. And hopefully no broken body parts or concussions when you fall off because this 20' trampoline bad boy also floats. Flips, sky high leaps, twists, and other trampo-tricks gone wrong will send their (lifejacketed and doggie paddle-trained) executer into the big soft hug of water instead of the hard, brutal backslap of dirt.
The Aqua Jump Eclipse 200 needs at least 10' of water to float and support its 3-adult or 6-child capacity. The trampoline extends 36" from the surface, and includes a stainless steel ladder for rejoining the jumping on each time you take a jump off.
"For those who feel they are alone, you can stand resolutely in righteousness knowing that the Atonement will protect and bless you beyond your ability to fully understand."
One really useful aspect of GitHub repos is that they allow us to host static websites thanks to GitHub Pages. But did you know that you can dynamically display all your GitHub repos on your website as well?
In this tutorial I’m going to show you a great little trick using repository metadata to create a portfolio of your open source projects just like this:
Preparation
Before we get started, you’re going to have to make sure all your open source projects are up to scratch. That means making sure they have a decent readme file and appropriate license. It doesn’t look good if your readme is missing or inaccurate. Additionally, you’ll need to fill in the description and url fields appropriately. These will be used as part of each portfolio item.
Making a New Repo
First off, we need to make a new repo on GitHub. To trigger GitHub Pages, you either need to name the repo as your username followed by .github.io so, in my case daviddarnes.github.io or a repo named of your choice, but with a main branch called gh-pages.
The “new repo” button on github.com
If you’re new to GitHub and aren’t sure how to setup a repo, take a look at this beginner-level introduction from Dan Wellman.
I’d recommend the username.github.io repo, if you aren’t already using it for something else. Many companies such as Yelp, IBM and Square use their main github.io website to showcase their open source projects, but it’s entirely up to you.
Make sure you select Jekyll in the .gitignore dropdown when creating your repo.
We won’t be creating a full Jekyll site, but we’ll be taking advantage of some of its features. If you need some help using Jekyll, check out Guy Routledge’s brilliant course Building Static Websites With Jekyll.
Core Files
After cloning down the repo (adding it to your local machine), you can start adding the essential files needed to list out your GitHub projects.
To configure our projects site we need to create a _config.yml file. This is what’s used to configure our Jekyll project. There isn’t much configuration required, we just need to tell Jekyll to ignore the readme.md file:
# Ignore repo files
exclude:
- README.md
The config file will also let the server know that we intend to use Jekyll with this repo.
The other file we need is an index.html file. Within this file we’ll be looping through the repositories on GitHub via their metadata API. We can do this with the power of Liquid, which is the templating language within Jekyll. You’ll need to add the following to the top of the index file to allow the usage of Liquid:
---
# Front matter
---
The two sets of dashes are used to wrap front matter for the file; settings for that particular page. However, because we don’t currently have any settings for the file I’ve just left a comment in there.
Markup
While in the index.html file, we need to add some HTML structure and some liquid to loop through the projects. Here’s my plain HTML structure:
Let’s just take a moment to breakdown what’s happening. We’re looping over each repo in site.github.public_repositories. site.github is where all the metadata for GitHub repos is stored, part of that being all the public repositories.
Then, for the purposes of this demo, I’ve limited the loop with limit:28, so the demo page isn’t too long.
Next I’m checking if it’s a forked repo. If repo.fork is not true we’ll continue with the output. If you like contributing to other projects on GitHub, like myself, then you tend to have a few forked repos. This check, should you want it, will prevent them from appearing in your portfolio.
Lastly, for each repo, we output the values {{ repo.homepage }} and {{ repo.name }} in an anchor.
Seeing it in Action
Now you need to commit these changes and push them; either to master or gh-pages (depending on the setup you chose). Then, to view your basic project listing site:
if it’s a custom repo with gh-pages, then go to username.github.io/name-of-the-repo
if its a repo called username.github.io, then you can just go to that url
It won’t be a very exciting output yet–here’s what the basic demo looks like using my own GitHub account:
It’s time to add some style and detail to our projects!
Getting Creative
You can do all sorts of checks and filtering with the GitHub metadata. Some of the data values have been documented, but if you want some more detailed examples you can drill down into their API. First of all, we should add a CSS file so we can style up the page.
Thanks to Jekyll, we can use an SCSS file to directly style our portfolio. Create a styles.scss file within a new css directory and add a front matter comment to the top of the file:
---
# Styles
---
This comment works in the same way it does the in the index.html. Jekyll recognises the file and handles the preprocessing for us. You can style things however you want, but after a bit of flexbox work and adding Google Fonts, I now have this:
Take a look at the SCSS tab on the demo above to see how I’ve styled things.
More Meta
Now let’s try bringing in some additional information about each repository. Firstly, let’s add a description:
{{ repo.description }} will bring through the description that appears above your repository on GitHub.
How about we show how many stars and forks we’ve had on each repository as well? We can achieve this with {{ repo.stargazers_count }} and {{ repo.forks_count }} like so:
As this shows, you can expose a lot of data from your GitHub repositories. Some of this is trial and error; it’s just a matter of trying different values and checking the results. Jekyll shouldn’t throw an error (most of the time), so you’ll be able to see if the result works or not on the live page.
In my example, I’ve added icons and colours to each item to reflect the main language they were written in. I achieved this by adding a class using {{ repo.language }}. I was then able to style each item depending on the language. See the following example:
In the example above I’m using liquid’s downcase filter to remove any uppercase characters. You’ll also see that I’ve added an icon in the form of an SVG sprite. Again, I’m using {{ repo.language }} as the ID for each of my icons. If you want to know more on SVG sprite icons, take a look at a tutorial I wrote a while back:
Of course, your own projects page doesn’t have to look anything like this. You can be as creative as you want! For example, here is my personal open source projects site: https://daviddarnes.github.io. I’ve used quite a few features and tricks in mine, so if you want to pick out anything from it, you can view the code on GitHub.
Homework
There are one or two details which we haven’t dealt with, and a couple of features which we could add.
For example, in our demo there are still missing SVG icons for some languages.
Repos with long titles without spaces break out from their containers; this can be fixed with CSS.
Lastly, if you’re familiar with Jekyll and GitHub Pages, you can use the github-metadata gem with the GitHub Pages gem to develop your GitHub portfolio locally.
SolarWinds compiled a list of the most hilarious IT requests, thanks to their community members? help by sharing their helpdesk horror stories...
"Workers looking for upgraded ?Wi-Five?, needing ?more LAN? for their computers and wondering why emails won?t send to postal addresses all make an appearance in our look into the most ridiculous IT requests.
Employees will naturally have a wide range of computer literacy, but if you receive a question wondering what the mute symbol means when their earphone won?t work, we wouldn?t blame you for taking them a little less seriously.
We asked our thwack community to reveal some of the worst requests they?ve received, and we were overwhelmed with the response. You can find the complete list of the replies on our thwack community post, but the best of the bunch can be seen in the images below!"
In a matter of hours this week, Microsoft’s AI-powered chatbot,
Tay, went from a jovial teen to a Holocaust-denying menace openly
calling for a race war in ALL CAPS.
The bot’s sudden dark turn shocked many people, who rightfully
wondered how Tay, imbued with the personality of a 19-year-old
girl, could undergo such a transformation so quickly, and why
Microsoft would release it into the wild without filters for
hate speech.
Sources at Microsoft told BuzzFeed News that Tay was outfitted
with some filters for vulgarity and the like. What the bot was not
outfitted with were safeguards against those dark forces on the
internet that would inevitably do their damnedest to corrupt her.
That proved a critical oversight.
Sorry about that, everyone! Work got insane last week. Was working about 14 hours a day for a couple days. Even worked 17.5 hours on Thursday. But that’s done and now I have a comic about how my brain is all messed up right now!
HAPPY EASTER EVERYONE! I spent all day yesterday making and photographing these eggs from a few of my favorite fandoms! I colored them with BIC & Crayola markers and it was super fun! This was my first year coloring eggs as an adult so I went with a mixed basket of fandoms. I think next year I'll stick to one theme...
So the fandoms and characters I went with are Finn, Jake and Lumpy Space Princess from Adventure Time, Deadpool and Punisher from the Marvel universe, Sunny the cat from Neko Atsume (next year I kinda want to do all kitties, hehe *meow*), a Star Trek: The Next Generation communicator badge (my favorite of the Treks, I'm sad I didn't get any Star Wars eggs made though, next year I will make BB-8!), my favorite and most used emoji when texting and of course I had to include my oldest and still beloved fandom, Super Mario Bros., represented in the form of a power-up mushroom! I hope you like them, enjoy! Feel free to post your Easter Eggs too, I'd love to see!!
Casio’s latest Android Wear offering has arrived on the Play Store, and it’s gonna cost you. The Casio Smart Outdoor Watch is priced at $499.99, which will get you a very rugged watch with fewer features than expected.
The watch features a 320×300 color LCD with a monochrome mode for battery savings, 512MB of RAM, 4GB of storage, a mineral glass, resin and stainless steel case, and urethane band. It’s an outdoor-focused watch with resistance to up to 50 meters of water and it’s certified to meet military MIL-STD-810G standards.
Casio’s watch also features apps like ViewRanger, MyRadar, and Runkeeper along with custom watchfaces to make it more useful on adventures. One strange omission is a GPS chip. That seems like a pretty important inclusion for fitness and outdoor hiking, especially at a $500 price tag.
If you want to grab it in either orange or olive colors, hit the source link to pick it up. But at that price point, it seems kind of hard to justify. What do you think of the price on this watch? Is it worth it if you need a rugged smartwatch? Leave a comment!
Part of being a parent is knowing the right thing to say at exactly the right time.
