Descriptive Posts

These posts are good examples of organically growing reports on datasets that contain minimal prior knowledge. I both the posts we can track the history of knowledge growth and similarly we can append variables in the front matter for later use.

Post Organization

The Polymer Modeling provides a great example for separating posts on different topics.

What are good rules to separate posts?

Data Pages

I made a post a while ago about data files. Data files can be accessed by any post or page in a Jekyll site. Currently, we have one example. These files should contain lightweight metadata for:

  • Simple Analytics
  • Pointers to Files
  • Comments

References

Lot’s of y’all are managing your references really well! Let’s make it easier though.

References can be created using an array variable references in the front matter. All the fields elements in references are appended to the end of a blog post by the Jekyll template.

Tagline

Add the field tagline in the front matter to create a short description of the post on your blog index.

Diagrams

Diagrams are absolutely critical to a data scientist that needs to learn about our problem sets. Most of this information can only be observed visually.

I love the diagrams belowbecause they are as descriptive as they can and do not assume any expertise on the viewer:

Citing References

References are cited with the following syntax {{page.references[i]}} where i is the index of the element in the arrage. Appreviated references can be made using the liquid statement assign. For example, in another post the variable ref is assigned {% assign ref=page.references %}; references are now access with {{ref[i]}}.

Remember the zero-indexing.

Disqus is Still Busted

On some projects, your Disqus comments are not working. Ahmet posted a solution for this problem.

Project Management

These projects have illustrated very descriptive uses of Github Issues and Milestones:

IPython

I hope some of y’all move towards IPython notebooks to conduct your research. They are a useful connection between the content and context of your research.

Some Examples Class Notebooks

Reusable Front Matter for Blogging and Computing

Q: What do I put in the Front Matter?

A: Potentially resusable content. (ie. links, statistics, commments)

In a recent post, I show a IPython notebook that reuses the YAML front matter in the python environment. Post front matter can be expected to mature as a data file when the as the veracity and value of the methods are assessed during the research process. In an example data file, small statistics are included that can be used later.