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2. Project management

This assignment is about:

Individual assignment

  • work through a git tutorial
  • build a personal site in the class archive describing you and your final project

Below are the steps I took to familiarise myself with building a website using Git, Mkdocs, and Markdown and documenting my learning process. These tools are all new and exciting to me.

Git

I follow the procedure below to set up my Gitlab repo

  1. Clone the online repo by running git pull

  2. Set up an SSH key and add the public key to my Gitlab profile

  3. Edit the .md file template with a text editor (I used Notepadd++)

  4. To add pictures, run git add

  5. Run git commit -a

A window pops up asking what changes I made, so that I type those out, and close the window.

The system then returns

  1. Run git push

Now I am officially a git pusher. It feels great!

Problems encountered

1. Unable to push to Gitlab repository

Solution: check and log in to the correct account

Solution: run git add command

git add images/w1-sketch01-600px.jpg

Mkdocs

I followed the instruction on mkdocs.org to install Mkdocs.

After installing Python, I ran the following commands from terminal

pip install –upgrade pip

pip install mkdocs

mkdocs –version

mkdocs serve

The system returns

INFO    -  Documentation built in 4.72 seconds
[I 210213 13:41:24 server:335] Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000
INFO    -  Serving on http://127.0.0.1:8000
[I 210213 13:41:24 handlers:62] Start watching changes
INFO    -  Start watching changes
[I 210213 13:41:24 handlers:64] Start detecting changes
INFO    -  Start detecting changes

Next, I opened the configuration file: mkdocs.yml in Notepad++ and customized site name, description, author, and social media links. I also changed the default font from Ubuntu to DM Sans.

I would like to change the favicon as well but I have not created a .svg for it.

Markdown

As recommended by FabAcademy tutorials, I followed this Markdown Tutorial to learn the ropes of Markdown syntax. I found it very quick and easy. I use Notepad++ to edit my local .md files.

Video compression

Previously I had used ffmpeg to extract images from a video frame by frame so it is already there on my computer. The ffmpeg.exe and videos to be processed need to be in the same folder. One can either copy the fffmpeg.exe file to where the videos are, or vice versa, copy the videos to the existing location of ffmpeg.exe, before running the following terminal commands.

Compress input.mp4 and save it as output.mp4

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -vf scale=-1:720 -b:v 1000k output.mp4

With this, I was able to compress a 116MB mp4 file down to 6MB.

You can also trim a specific section in the video while compressing it

ffmpeg -i input.mp4 -ss 00:00:00.0 -t 00:00:07.0 output.mp4

To display the video, we will write the following in Markdown.

Last update: November 16, 2021