Our New Blog
@ Matthew Turk | Sunday, Nov 4, 2012 | 4 minute read | Update at Sunday, Nov 4, 2012

We’ve got a new blog! Here’s a post that talks about the changes we’ve made and how we expect to move forward!

Our New Blog

Hi everyone! Welcome to the new yt Project blog. We've gotten rid of the old Posterous-based blog in favor of making it easier to include code, entries from anybody in the community, and to overall make it easier and clearer how to contribute.

So, to that end, we've moved to using a combination of pretty cool technologies to make it easy to blog and have your entry added to the blog.

For the blogging itself, we use Blohg, which is a mercurial-backed system. So all the blog entries are stored in a mercurial repository, on BitBucket (yt_analysis/blog) and instead of being in HTML or something, they're written in ReStructured Text (ReST) -- which is the same format that the yt docstrings and documentation are all written in. We're standardizing on ReST, which means to contribute to any of yt, you only have to learn one way to format your text. (Plus, ReST is super easy.)

To add a new entry, you just have to fork the blog repository and then issue a Pull Request. You can add the entry by creating a new file in the directory [content/post]{.title-ref}, and it'll automatically show up with your name and the time you added it. Once your pull request is accepted, the blog will be automatically rebuilt and uploaded to the blog site (thanks to Shining Panda, which we use for our testing suite -- more on that later!) which lives inside Amazon's cloud.

But the best part is that this is all hidden behind the scenes. For all intents and purposes, you just need to add your text, issue a pull request, and it'll show up in a few minutes.

But here's the best part -- by converting to this system, we've also made it easy to include code samples using the IPython Notebook. A bunch of the yt developers have started using the IPython notebook for basically everything -- analysis, teaching, sharing snippets -- and we want to keep using it for everything. (If you take a look over at https://hub.yt-project.org/ you can see that we've started uploading Notebooks to the yt Data Hub, which then get displayed by the amazing NBViewer project by the IPython developers.) So, we made it easy to include a notebook here in the blog.

To include the notebook, you'll first need a copy of the NBConvert repository, which will also need to be in your PYTHONPATH. You may also need to install the "pandoc" project, but that's usually included in most Linux distributions and can be gotten with MacPorts. Once you've added that, just cd to the blohg directory and run::

python2.7 blohg_converter.py /path/to/your/notebook.ipynb

This will grab all the images and put them in the right directories inside the blog repository, add a new .rst file, and then you're set to go. Just run hg ci -A and you're good to go!

Because this blog is a bit new, we're still working through some kinks. Already as I've made a couple changes, the RSS feed has marked itself as completely updated; this is an error, so I'm trying to figure out what's going on and fix it up. So I apologize in advance if any other minor glitches happen along the way!

With this change in the blogging system, I think we've lowered the barrier to sharing with the community changes in yt, new features, and even showing old features using the Notebook. I'm really optimistic

And if you have something you would like to share -- a new paper you've written, something cool you've done (even if not in yt!) or anything else, go ahead and fork the repository and write up a blog post -- everything you need comes in the box!

yt extension modules

yt has many extension packages to help you in your scientific workflow! Check these out, or create your own.

ytini

ytini is set of tools and tutorials for using yt as a tool inside the 3D visual effects software Houdini or a data pre-processor externally to Houdini.

Trident

Trident is a full-featured tool that projects arbitrary sightlines through astrophysical hydrodynamics simulations for generating mock spectral observations of the IGM and CGM.

pyXSIM

pyXSIM is a Python package for simulating X-ray observations from astrophysical sources.

ytree

Analyze merger tree data from multiple sources. It’s yt for merger trees!

yt_idv

yt_idv is a package for interactive volume rendering with yt! It provides interactive visualization using OpenGL for datasets loaded in yt. It is written to provide both scripting and interactive access.

widgyts

widgyts is a jupyter widgets extension for yt, backed by rust/webassembly to allow for browser-based, interactive exploration of data from yt.

yt_astro_analysis

yt_astro_analysis is the yt extension package for astrophysical analysis.

Make your own!!

Finally, check out our development docs on writing your own yt extensions!

Contributing to the Blog

Are you interested in contributing to the yt blog?

Check out our post on contributing to the blog for a guide!

We welcome contributions from all members of the yt community. Feel free to reach out if you need any help.

the yt data hub

The yt hub at https://girder.hub.yt/ has a ton of resources to check out, whether you have yt installed or not.

The collections host all sorts of data that can be loaded with yt. Some have been used in publications, and others are used as sample frontend data for yt. Maybe there’s data from your simulation software?

The rafts host the yt quickstart notebooks, where you can interact with yt in the browser, without needing to install it locally. Check out some of the other rafts too, like the widgyts release notebooks – a demo of the widgyts yt extension pacakge; or the notebooks from the CCA workshop – a user’s workshop on using yt.

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