[yt-dev] Outreach to the community / blog rewrite / IPython notebooks

[Matthew Turk]

Hi all,

Yesterday I converted the blog to a new format.  It now uses ReST, the same
format as sphinx.

The blog can be a very effective means of reaching out to the community to
share new information.  At a bootcamp I ran a few weeks ago, many
experienced users of yt were seeing PlotWindow for the very first time.
 We're doing some really cool stuff that nobody really knows about, because
our communication channels are either transient (email), sparse (release
announcements) or overwhelming (docs.)  A blog is a good middle ground, but
our existing blog on Posterous was awful: no one knew how to format code,
every post looked different, had to manually approve stuff, blah blah.

So the new format uses ReST, and is super easy.

Fork here:

https://bitbucket.org/yt_analysis/blog/fork

And add a new .rst file under content/post/ .  You should set an "author"
and you can see how this is done elsewhere.

Then issue a pull request, and bam, as soon as that PR is accepted, it gets
rebuilt and posted at http://blog.yt-project.org/ .

I've also written a converter using IPython's nbconvert that will convert
to the format needed for this particular blogging engine.  So you can use a
notebook to show some code, intersperse text and images, and then just run
the blohg_converter.py script on it, and it will add a new post.  This part
needs a bit of cleanup on my part, but it's somewhat documented already.

Anyway, please -- if you do something cool, or write a new feature, add a
post on the blog!  I looked at feedburner today and we have 21 subscribers.
 I don't know how this is calculated, but yowza.

-Matt

--

Technical details about the new blog:

blohg for maintaining it (blohg.org)
bitbucket for storing the repository
shiningpanda for building
s3 for hosting
IPython's nbconvert as engine to drive conversion of .ipynb => blohg ReST
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