External Website Instructions

Lab Website (external)

We regularly update our website (current contact persons: Hengyuan, Andy):

• when you have a talk or a poster presentation somewhere (excluding classes),

• when (1) you submit a paper and want its bib info to appear on the website even if the pdf is not public yet, (2) when a paper is accepted, (3) when arxiv or camera-ready versions are out, (4) when you make some supplementary material (code, video, etc.) available, or

• when you write a blog post for the website or for the SAIL blog.

Please let the contact person know when any of these things happens.

Lab Website Instructions & Conventions -- This should be only needed by the website admin!

General Information

ILIAD website is hosted by GitHub Pages on http://stanford-iliad.github.io . It is using the Pixyll theme, powered by Jekyll. We have been making changes on the original theme as needed. All the files in the website are at this GitHub repository. 

We then have a DNS entry that was set up by the department (Stanford CS). Thanks to this DNS entry and the CNAME file in the GitHub repository, we are able to use https://iliad.stanford.edu instead of the default github.io link. Any future issue with the DNS entry should be resolved by the department IT -- we do not have control over it. 

Making Changes

Technically, anyone who has write-access to the GitHub repo may make changes on the website (so always pull before making changes just in case!). But it is probably not ideal. Instead, it is good to have someone responsible for the website. This was Erdem from 2018 to 2021, and has transitioned to Andy in Summer 2021.

After you have write-access, it is easy to make changes. For your first time:

1. Do the first two steps of Jekyll installation: https://jekyllrb.com/docs/

2. Clone the repository

3. Set your current branch to be source (not master, this is important)

4. Make your changes in the source branch.

5. Once you are done, run  rake publish["comment"] in the main directory

If it is not your first time, then you start with step 3, making sure you first pull.

Conventions

We have adopted some conventions for the website (but they are open to discussion of course) over time. Below is a (probably incomplete) list. And note, Dorsa’s preferences may overrule anything below 😀

People. This is for the “People” page of the website.

Order of People:

• It is basically based on seniority (Dorsa, postdocs, PhD students, MS students, undergrads). Within each group, seniority is based on when people joined the lab. One exception is “visiting researchers”, which come after all the active members of the lab.

• Alumni list also follows the seniority order. Different from the active people, within each group in Alumni, newer people are above the older people because we want the list to seem more up-to-date.

Links for People:

• The order is “home page”, “Google Scholar”, “GitHub profile”, “Twitter”. We used to have CVs, too. But they are hard to maintain, so we abandoned that.

Misc:

• All images are 600x600, because we don’t want the page to load slower or images to look different shape-wise, i.e. we don’t want some wide and some tall rectangles.

Publications. Next, let’s talk about the conventions for publications. In general, you should be able to copy-paste an old publication and make changes on it for the new publication. FAQ: The reason why we have separate “type” and “display” properties for each link is that some publications have multiple of the same link type (e.g. multiple videos). There could be more efficient ways to handle those, but automation would take some time…

Order of Publications:

• Newer publications are above the older ones (based on the conference start date).

• When we have multiple papers at the same conference, they are ordered alphabetically based on their titles.

• Journal papers or preprints do not have “conference start dates”, so we are adding them to the top of the list when their statuses change (i.e. when they are first submitted or finally accepted).

Links for Publications:

• The order is BibTeX (this is automatic), PDF, arXiv, Website, Code, Video, Talk, DOI

Misc:

• We use the “note” property for the co-first-authorships, and “specialnote” for paper awards or anything we want to highlight (e.g., oral presentations in conferences where only a subset of papers get oral presentations).

• Ideally, front figures should be no wider than 2-by-1 (i.e., width can be 2x the height). And we also do not want large image files because it will make the page load slower. If a front figure is larger than 1MB, we resize it to make it smaller.

News. We update the news when Dorsa gives an update for that list. For paper news, we usually have a single news entry for each conference. So if we have multiple papers at a conference, we usually wait for all of them to be publicly available before creating an entry.

Dorsa often forgets to give these updates! So whoever is the webmaster (Andy at the moment) should ping Dorsa about these once conference decisions are out or conferences/workshops are happening. In addition, the members of the lab are also welcome to remind Dorsa on what should go on News! 

Blog

We have a blog in the website! It’s definitely possible to write a blogpost only for this blog. But the usual way has been to co-publish at SAIL’s blog and here. Both systems use markdown. Unfortunately, there are some differences, so copying the same markdown doesn’t work. The changes are usually simple and limited to class names and image paths. You should take a look at older blog posts if it is your first time or just ask an experienced user for help.

Experiment Pages

We sometimes want to have landing pages on the website for our online experiments / user studies. See experiments/lander.html and /experiments/lander/ for an example of this -- they should be sufficient as an example to produce more pages like them. Before you start, please be aware that our web page is static, meaning that we do not run any code on a server (no PHP, no Python etc). You can, however, use Javascript, which runs on client machines.

Does someone need to create an experiment page like this? Tell them to follow the related subsection on this page.