Welcome to C5 Zine

Hosted on github : http://carbonfive.github.io/c5-zine/

This is where we store our zine which was originally written on https://zine-machine.glitch.me/.

Development

We're using middleman to help streamline building and deploying this site.

Read more about middleman with the link above.

Each issue should get a data/issue#.json file which contains a list of images and a pointer to the image directory (which is likely something like /source/images/issue#/.

For example, our data/issue1.json looks like this.

{
  "asset_dir": "issue1/",
  "pages": [
    {
      "title": "Nikki Thayer",
      "image":  "page1-nicole-thayer.png",
      "author" : "Social Distancing Issue 1"
    },
    { ... more pages }
  ]
}

The index.html.erb file then has access to that data so you can easily loop through images and build the new issue.

Steps to build issue next.

The short way:

./scripts/setup_next_issue.rb -p <previous issue number> -n <next issue number>

This will setup new directories and files for the new issue and move all the old into the right places.

You'll want to edit the title of ./source/index.html.erb because it'll have the old title, and update _footer_page.erb to include 1 more issue by incrementing num_past_issues.

Then add your images and content and update data/issue<new issue number>.json Let's assume the next issue is #2.

The long version (without the script):

• Get your image files and content together.
• Copy source/index.html.erb to source/issue1.html.erb
• Add and edit data/issue2.json to include the new set of data
• Edit references in source/index.html.erb from data.issue1 to data.issue2

That should be it.

You can run bundle exec rake serve (or bundle exec middleman server) to see the local version (at http://localhost:4567).

NOTES about the data file

The shape of every entry in your issue.json file can include partial_name - if present, the page will be rendered from the partial.

It can include blank: true. If set, this will enter a blank page in the DOM.

Most typically it should include:

• title - used as the image title
• author - used for the byline
• image - the image file name - expected to be under source/images/issue#/

{
  "partial_name": "",
  "title": "",
  "image":  "",
  "author":  ""
}

For images, the image should live under the specified asset_dir as noted above. For text (poetry, prose or other general html content), you can use partial_name to specify the partial that contains that content. Partials can be in the /source directory. The filename should start with an underscore but you don't need an underscore in the data file.

For example, an entry like

{
  "partial_name": "issue2/poem",
  "title": "",
  "image":  "",
  "author":  ""
}

will load source/issue2/_poem.erb content up for that page. You may have to add styling to the scss files to accommodate. We use this system to load the footer on the last page.

Deployment

We've included middleman-github-deploy or mgdhttps://github.com/hovancik/middleman-github-deploy) This task simply runs mgd

bundle exec rake deploy

Visit the newly deployed site at https://carbonfive.github.io/c5-zine