Generating Profiles for the Web Site

The profile pages on TCM's web site have a standard format. The firm intention of the Group is that this should be so. You are quite welcome, indeed, encouraged, to write your own personal home page too, and this may follow the TCM style if you wish, or may be completely different. (You could also do the converse, and redirect your home page to your profile page.)

The profile pages pull in information from a central database, and need a little personal customisation too. They can be created and updated with the command web_profile.

This page describes the basic scheme. More advanced configuration, including hiding phone numbers, is possible via a configuration file ~/web_profile/config.txt and via various other files in one's web_profile directory.

The profile consists of three sections. The top is a terse list of personal details, including an optional photograph. The middle is a description of one's research. The bottom is a list of one's publications. Only the top is (close to) absolutely obligatory.

Customisation is achieved by placing files in one's profile directory ~/web_profile/ and then running the web_profile command. The web_profile command collects data from various sources into files which the web server uses. Changes will be reflected immediately on the web server, although you may have to press shift whilst pressing reload to ensure the your browser does not cache an old version (if Firefox, other browsers will differ).

Photograph

If you wish to provide a photograph, it will appear both on your profile page, and the gallery which links to it. If you don't, a dummy blank head and shoulders will be used instead. The photograph should be a JPEG with a width of 0.75 times its height. It will be displayed at a height of 300 pixels. Image sizes of 225 by 300 or, if targetting high-resolution displays, 338 by 450 or even 450 by 600 would seem sensible. The file size should be under 70KB.

The filename to use for the photograph is simply self.jpg.

(If you ever wish to remove, rather than replace, your photograph, simply delete it from your ~/web_profile/ and rerun the web_profile command.)

Top

Most of this information is generated automatically. If items are wrong in the automatically-generated information, then the Group's Computer Officer should be told! You can choose whether your email address and office phone number are shown using a file called ~/web_profile/config.txt. This file can also be used to add a link to a personal website. Just two further text items can be modified, and most people will not wish to do so. However, those who wish to fiddle should see under advanced tips.

Middle

This is the main section which needs to be customised. It should contain a description of one's research, complete with a single image. It should also contain a "plain English" section giving a description of one's research suited to a non-specialist audience (e.g. a sixthformer).

The research description is taken from a file called research.html in one's profile directory. This should be written in HTML. However, it need not contain any fancy formatting other than that paragraphs should start with the tag <p> and end with the tag </p>. Of course if you wish to use further simple markup, that is fine. If you do wish to use subheadings, they should start from <h3>. Links to other pages are fine.

The research image should be called either research_image.jpg or research_image.png. If it is present, the web_profile script will automatically include it next time it is run (you should not attempt to use an img tag to refer to it). The image should be approximately square. It will be displayed at at size of up to about 400 pixels wide, and its filesize should be no more than a couple of hundred KB. Attempts to include further images are not at all encouraged.

The plain English text is taken from a file called plain_english.html and works in the same way as research.html.

Bottom

The bottom section lists "Featured Publications". This comes from a file called featured_pubs.html. It is intended that this be an HTML list, including the ul tags, of the form generated by the pubs command when passed a format of html2.

The pubs command in TCM has its own web page. The impatient who are sufficiently senior to be in the Symplectic database can simply type:

pubs -f html2 -r -c 6 -n > ~/web_profile/featured_pubs.html

to get their most recent six publications into this file in a suitable format. I'd recommend increasing the 6, and then manually deleting the less exciting publications

Those less senior may need to try:

pubs -f html2 -r -c 6 -a -q 'authors like "%Smith, A%"' > ~/web_profile/featured_pubs.html

The utility of this will depend on how common one's name is.

Deletion

As stated above, the photograph can be deleted simply by deleting it from one's ~/web_profile/ directory and rerunning the web_profile command.

The whole of the text can be removed with:

web_profile --delete

The Bottom Line

Changes made in one's ~/web_profile/ directory will appear the next time you run the web_profile command, or the next time all profiles get updated, which is likely to happen whenever there is a major change to the database which generates the top part of the profiles.