Census home

This is the home project for any Census-related projects we do. The idea is to have a collection of these projects that can be updated quickly when new data releases come out, then we can add some specific interactives to help us tell actual stories.

Updating the projects

There is a Google spreadsheet census-home data in the interactives@statesman.com account that has the data.

Use Mr. Data Converter to copy & paste the contents of that, convert to JSON - Properties, then copy/paste into the public/data/data.json.

Project list

The idea is to add new projects to this README and also to the project index.

• census-estimates-2016-city
• census-estimates-2016-county
• census-estimates-detail
• census-estimates-2015
• census-estimates-2014

There are other projects on the index, but they are not repo-based projects.

Project development

This uses the framework for a single page project, though it could be multiple pages. Just less complex than our immersive-template setup.

Steps when you set up a project

• Use package.json and run npm install
• You need the .ftppass and .slack files described below.
• Update the slug and projectsDirectory variables in Gruntfile.js.
• Update the thumbnail and url variables at the top of index.php.
• Run the default grunt task.

NOTE: One difference with this project compared to other single-page-projects is the inclusion of a keep: command in the ftppush node of the .Gruntfile. This ensures the projects published inside it are not blown away by this project.

Public folder

There is a public folder that has the published files:

• assets: images and other accces
• dist: where js and css is compiled
• fonts: for font-awesome
• includes: files for metrics, advertising and other includes

Src folder

The src folder is for components that are used by grunt tasks and copied into the public/dist folder:

• js: for project specific files. main.js will get minified into the dist folder.
• less: for less css source files, based on bootstrap.

Configurations

ftpush

The path is in Gruntfile.js. Add the username/password into a file called .ftppass as per ftpush docs. Make sure that file is in the .gitignore.

{
  "key": {
    "username": "username",
    "password": "password"
  }
}

slack msg

The grunt-slack-hook plugin let's us publish finished url to slack as part of ftpush. Needs a .slack file with the Webhook URL from Slack configurations. Just a single line with that url and no return.