Adding and Configuring Social Links

Summary:

The Indigo theme allows users to maintain and display a selection of links to their social presence. A recent modification to this functionality makes configuring and maintaining these links, very easy.

Index

• Background
• Improvements
• Compatibility
• Additions for scientific users

Background

Traditionally, a pre-defined set of social links were made available for the user to enable/disable, via the use of named configuration variables in _config.yml, like so:

facebook: myfacebook
twitter: mytwitter
# google: mygoogle
# instagram: myinstagram
# pinterest: mypinterest
linkedin: mylinkedin
youtube: myyoutube
spotify: myspotify
github: mygithub
email: myemail@gmail.com

Depending on which links were required, the user would un-comment (remove the ‘#’ symbol at the beginning of the line) specific lines of the config and replace the dummy names (myfacebook, mytwitter, etc.) with their actual IDs from each of the sites.

Once enabled, the _includes/social-links.html file would rely on the configs and display the corresponding set of links along with icon assets from _include/icons.html.

Improvements

With the existing implementation, it was not very easy to add new links or re-order them on the home page. To make this process easier, the following improvements were made.

• The manifest of social links was moved to a YAML formatted data file, _data/social-links.yml, which stores the social site name (e.g. facebook), url-prefix (e.g. facebook.com/), url-scheme (e.g. https://) and icon name (only required, if the icon name was different from the social site name).

  Here are some sample configurations:

    - name: facebook
      url-prefix: facebook.com/
  
    - name: twitter
      url-prefix: twitter.com/
  
    - name: lanyrd
      url-prefix: lanyrd.com/
      url-scheme: 'http://'
      icon: microphone
  
    - name: email
      url-scheme: 'mailto:'
      icon: mail
  

• The updated _includes/social-links.html file iterates over the entries in _data/social-links.yml, and makes use of the actual IDs configured in _config.yml along with the icons in _includes/icons.html to render the linkouts.

• A new configuration variable called social-links-order in _config.yml allows the user to specify the explicit ordering of the linkouts (which overrides the listed order in _data/social-links.yml manifest file). For example:

    social-links-order: [github, facebook, twitter, medium, email]
  

Compatibility

These changes are fully backward compatible with the previous social link configuration set in _config.yml. No changes are needed as long as you did not make modifications to your own _includes/social-links.html.

If you use the new social-links-order variable, ensure that you add all the social media names to the list, otherwise they will not show up.

Additions for scientific users

For users in the scientific/academic fields who wish to link out to relevant resources that track their publication records, citation impact metrics, etc., Indigo now offers a set of scientific social linkouts to the following websites:

• Google Scholar
• ResearchGate
• Mendeley
• PubMed
• ORCiD
• Impactstory
• figshare

John Doe

A Man who travels the world eating noodles

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