emonson / FridayForumSite

Visualization Friday Forum site and Google Spreadsheet data gathering

Visualization Friday Forum schedule site code

These are the files that support the schedule page for the Visualization Friday Forum at Duke University.

The data for the past and upcoming talks is kept in a Google Spreadsheet that has a separate tab for each semester. In the past, besides adding a new tab to the spreadsheet, I had to create a new page every semester and change some header and footer info in old ones. Now, the schedule page itself is a single page application that draws from that data and automatically deals slightly differently with the current page vs past or future semesters.

For convenience of programming, I make a separate Excel spreadsheet, SheetNames.xlsx, which specifies the tab names, and holds some other metadata necessary for creating the sitemap.xml file which Google uses for indexing since there are not individual page files for each semester's schedule.

New semester

When you want to add a new semster on to the schedule:

1. Add a new tab to the Google spreadsheet with the name of the semester in the format (Fall|Spring)_YYYY.
2. In the SheetNames.xlsx Excel file:
   • Add a new row with the new Google spreadsheet tab name in the semester column.
   • Update which semesters are current, past or future in the status column.
   • Update dates when Google should think the pages were last modified in the lastmod column. None required for current or future.
   • Enter a value, if necessary, in the priority column. I've been using 0.6 priority for current, 0.3 for one semster past, 0.1 for two semesters past and 0.05 for further past. No priority value is entered for future semesters.
3. Run the excel2json_sheetnames_sitemap.py script to generate both the JSON file the site Javascript will use, plus the sitemap.xml file that Google will use for indexing the site.
4. Commit and push changes to GitHub.
5. Upload changes to site host.