There's a technology event for everyone this week in Washington, DC with a HacDC meetup on tech revamping, an Enyo.JS demo for developers, an outdoor Drone event, and more. Go out and take advantage of everything DC has to offer by being productive and learning something new. Check back weekly for our roundup of local technology events.

Tuesday, May 14

7:30 pm

HacDC: Join DC Hackers as they find new ways to tinker with technology. Help them improve the world by breaking down and rebuilding technology, all while in the pursuit of finding new uses for it. For more information visit them at hacdc.org.

Wednesday, May 15

6:30 pm

Introduction to Enyo.JS: This one is for the developers. Come and learn about Enyo.JS, a JavaScript framework that's new to the scene through a demo of Enyo.JS and a discussion around how it's simplifying cross-platform mobile and desktop app development. Learn how to create well-structured, maintainable apps at this CrossPlatformDev meetup.

8:30 pm - 1:30 am

DC Nightowls: The DC Nightowls move back to the AOL Fishbowl Labs for their productivity and coworking session. Satisfy your urge to work into the early hours of the morning in NoVa with your fellow Nightowls.

Saturday, May 18

2:00 pm

Drone User Group: Join the Drone User Group this week as artist and developer Terry Kilby leads an aerial photography demonstration using a drone. He'll discuss how to select the best equipment and how to compose your shots to capture the highest quality images. Come learn about Kilby's work and techniques, contribute your own knowledge, and have fun flying drones at this week's DC Drone User Group.

We're thrilled to release a new version of Prose, adding in new features like a metadata editor, Jekyll layout previews, a markdown toolbar, temporary caching of in-progress edits, and more, all wrapped in a redesigned user friendly interface.

Just seven weeks ago, Tristen laid out ambitious plans to redesign and refocus Prose to make it a beautifully simple content authoring environment for CMS-free websites. Since then, and as part of our work on the next version of healthcare.gov, we've been sprinting to redesign, resolve bugs, and add new features. You can start using Prose v1 now at Prose.io, or check out the source on GitHub. Here's a look at what's new.

Simple, flat user interface

The new user interface for Prose is all about editing content. We've removed the distractions and focused on creating a simple environment for writing content and managing websites in GitHub.

The layout scales much better to include new feature like a markdown formatting toolbar in the file editor, and paves the way for a responsive layout, which we hope to implement soon.

Metadata editor for Jekyll posts

When using Prose with a Jekyll site, we've made it simpler to manage the yaml front matter for posts. By implementing a form-based editor, developers can set default metadata values and let content editors edit them without typing any yaml.

The metadata editor is completely configurable to match the metadata values required for custom Jekyll sites. Developers should check out the Prose configuration documentation for a look at what's possible.

Jekyll layout previews

Now Prose previews Jekyll posts in their full layout so you can get an accurate picture of what posts will look like before you publish them.

To use the layout previews with a Jekyll site, just add a line to your _config.yml file to tell Prose where your published site is hosted.

Performance, refactoring, and more

There are dozens of bug fixes and smaller new features in Prose. By focusing on page load performance, we shaved off about a second from each editor page load. We've also refactored a lot of the codebase to follow more standard conventions, and documented guidelines for developing on GitHub.

For a full list of everything new, check out the closed pull requests on GitHub.

Next up

We're jumping right into a new sprint to add a few more features that we think will really enhance the content editing experience in Prose. Over the next few weeks, we'll be adapting to a responsive layout and testing Prose on tablets and smart phones — great for making quick edits to content on the go. We're also working on a image / file upload feature, so you can easily add inline images or attached files in your posts. And we're sketching out how we can improve linking to posts within a site instead of needing to past URLs to published posts.

We'd love your contributions. Head over to GitHub to get started or report an issue. To learn more about Prose, see the Prose anouncement post.

Few services have altered the way we build websites like GitHub Pages. The free hosting service that updates websites every time you commit changes to GitHub runs nearly all of our projects over the last two years, including some really big ones, like the United Nations Development Programme's open data portal. It is fast, reliable, and has an incredibly easy workflow for development.

For those cases where we need the simplicity of GitHub Pages' workflow but have to host on our own infrastructure, we built Jekyll-hook. It's an extensible server that builds Jekyll sites on each commit to a GitHub repository, just like GitHub Pages. It provides a ton of additional flexibility, while preserving the benefits of static site generation, like needing no server-side processing to serve webpages.

Jekyll-hook is a Node.js server that receives web hook requests from GitHub.com, or a GitHub Enterprise server, generates a Jekyll site, and publishes it. The generation and publication processes are configurable with simple bash scripts. Get the full details at the Jekyll-hook project readme.

Why use Jekyll-hook?

For the majority of our projects, GitHub Pages works well. But there are some cases where additional needs drive us to build our own hosting environment:

• Use Jekyll plugins
• Publish directly to a CDN
• Host content behind authentication

Use Jekyll plugins

With GitHub Pages, Jekyll runs in safe mode, which means no third-party plugins will run. On a project like healthcare.gov, we encounter several simple problems that can be solved with small plugins that alter the way Jekyll builds the website. For instance, we just released the Jekyll Google Analytics plugin we're using to download Google Analytics data and sort posts by popularity each time the new healthcare.gov website is rebuilt.

Using Jekyll-hook, you set up the Jekyll server, so you can run whatever plugins you want. Jekyll plugins introduce much lower risk than traditional CMS modules, because they run when the site is built, not when it is served. You can verify the plugin does what it should before your publish the website and not have to worry about plugins slowing down page load time.

In addition to Jekyll-ga, the new healthcare.gov uses plugins to generate a JSON-based content API, provide greater control to content administrators over post ordering and curation, and generate landing pages for blog post topics.

Publish directly to a CDN

For those cases where you need to be 100% certain of your website's availability and responsiveness, we recommend using a content distribution network. For MapBox, we use Cloudfront, which is part of Amazon Web Services. For healthcare.gov, we're planning to use Akamai. Both replicate content across a globally distributed network of servers to provide fast, reliable content delivery.

With Jekyll-hook, you write simple bash scripts to customize how your website is built where it is published. For the absolute best performance from your site, you would write a script that directly published your website to a cloud-based hosting environment like Amazon S3 or Akamai Net Storage and serve it through a CDN.

We've included a sample script that publishes Jekyll sites to Amazon S3. It works in the same way that GitHub Pages works, where repositories named *.github.com or *.github.io are hosted at the root of the S3 bucket, and other repositories for an owner or organization are hosted in subdirectories. If you use Jekyll-hook on new infrastructure, please contribute your publish scripts so we make it easy to people to use this server in a variety of hosting environments. We'll be working on an Akamai Net Storage script next.

Host content behind authentication

Occasionally, we'll work on a project that needs to be protected by authentication, either because the data is private or during development of a yet-to-be released website. To make this easier, we've included a sample NGINX configuration and publish script so that Jekyll-hook can build sites to a simple web server with basic authentication. For the new healthcare.gov build, we're using this on a micro EC2 server for a free / cheap development server that we can use to test and share the progress of our development.

Growing the CMS-free website stack

Just about nine months ago, we published our thoughts on building better websites by using Jekyll to generate static sites from content files and templates. By pairing this approach with APIs and embeds from services like Twitter, Disqus, Flickr, and Vimeo, we can build full-featured websites with absolutely no server-side processing when pages are viewed. It's an incredibly scalable and versatile approach that we're learning a lot about and expanding through our work with HHS on healthcare.gov.

About a year ago, to make editing static website simple for content writers, we built and released Prose — an open source web-based editor for Jekyll sites hosted on GitHub Pages. It's a writers' window into the powerful version control and collaboration features of GitHub. We're just a few days away from releasing the first major version of Prose, which focuses on improving the usability and simplicity of editing content with a refreshed interface, metadata editor, and support for full in-layout previews.

Now we're pushing the stack even further. In addition to the major upgrades to Prose, we recently shared how we're providing multi-lingual translations for Jekyll sites, our approach to accessibility testing, and released the Jekyll Google Analytics plugin, bringing a whole new level of advanced features to Jekyll sites that previously required clunky content management systems.

Jekyll-hook is the latest piece of the puzzle. By removing the dependency on GitHub Pages for hosting, the CMS-free stack is becoming one of the most open and flexible way to build websites.

Cover photo by sbisson, CC BY-NC-ND 2.0.

As we move into May, come out to learn about fun new wearable tech, talk "failure" with people who have been there and can find the humor in it, and stay informed about the great OpenStreetMap projects being innovated on right here in Washington, DC. Also this Friday we'll kickoff the Sunlight Foundation's sixth TransparencyCamp with a Open Government Happy Hour in the MapBox Garage. Have a great week and I hope to see you around!

Tuesday, April 30

6:00 pm

Tech4Dem FAILfaire and Happy Hour: This event attempts to take away the stigma of failing. The motto of FAILfaire is to learn from each others mistakes, so come and hear stories of tech projects for social change that haven't been major successes but are great learning experiences. If you're in the mood for a humorous, tongue-in-cheek look at the what does and does not work when starting a tech4dem project, check out FAILfaire 2013.

Wednesday, May 1

6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Anticipating Google Glass: Get an up-close look at Google's newest (and dare I say coolest) piece of tech, the Glass, with fellow "wearable tech" enthusiasts. Google has just shipped out the first batch of the Glass, so go see and learn all about them for yourself, while also getting to !

7:00 pm

Geo DC: May's Geo DC meetup will look at OpenStreetMap with a quick introduction to it followed by three lightening talks on editing OpenStreetMap and great projects that are changing the way OpenStreetMap is being used. Come see MapBox's Tom MacWright and Ansis Brammanis demo iD Editor.

Friday, May 3

6:30 pm - 10:00 pm

Open Government Happy Hour: MapBox is hosting a happy hour to kick off this weekend's TransparencyCamp! Come join us for cold drinks, tasty eats, and good company in the MapBox garage the night before the conference.

Saturday, May 4 - Sunday, May 5

TransparencyCamp 2013: This weekend the Sunlight Foundation is hosting it's sixth TransparencyCamp, an "unconference" for open government that promotes the use of new technologies and policies that make government more efficient and transparent. The goal of this conference is to create an atmosphere where everyone feels like they can contribute equally and be heard among the group. Individuals are encouraged to take part in making the schedule, leading sessions, and actively contributing to the framework of the conference.

For a content-heavy site like the new healthcare.gov, surfacing popular content gets the most interesting information to readers quickly. To make this possible with static sites generated with Jekyll, we're releasing the new jekyll-ga plugin that gets the latest Google Analytics data when Jekyll builds the site, making it available to use for sorting and in templates.

By default Jekyll sorts content posts chronologically and alphabetically. This works well for blogs, but now with jekyll-ga, we have many more options. Any metric you can track in Google Analytics — including custom variables — can be used to sort content or as a variable in our Liquid templates.

Using the plugin

Jekyll has a plugin system thats allows for dropping in custom code written in Ruby to generate or modify content. Any .rb files in the /_plugins directory get run at site build time.

Full instructions for setting up jekyll-ga are in the readme file, but here's the basic idea. By adding some configuration information into the _config.yml file for a Jekyll site, you can define a custom report to query from Google Analytics. You can specify any metric you want, and the date range for the report using absolute dates or several relative date formats such as now, yesterday, last week, and three months ago. Optionally, you can apply filters or segments to your reports based on settings you configure in Google Analytics. Here's how it all looks:

jekyll_ga:
service_account_email: # service account email address
key_file: privatekey.p12 # service account private key file
key_secret: notasecret # service account private key's password
profileID: ga:#### # profile ID
start: last month # Beginning of report
end: now # End of report
metric: ga:pageviews # Metric code
segment: # optional
filters: # optional
sort: true # Sort posts by this metric


In this case, we're querying pageviews, but you could use any metric available in Google analytics, which opens up several possibilities for organizing your content. For instance, with custom variables, you could have javascript trigger events that Google Analytics records, such as clicking a "like" button, that you then use for sorting content when your site is rebuilt.

Advanced sorting

Pairing jekyll-ga with jekyll-sort let's you have content sorted in multiple lists, such as preserving the default chronological sorting of site.posts content lists, while also adding in a site.popular_posts list.

For more on this and other uses, see the readme file for jekyll-ga, and get the plugin on GitHub.

Next Up

The redesign of healthcare.gov will make it easy to discover and consume content by ensuring accessibility, supporting Spanish translations, and now exposing popular content across the site.

We're developing healthcare.gov as a CMS-free Jekyll website in tandem with a new release of Prose, the online editor for Jekyll and GitHub. Stay tuned for more updates on both in the next few days, including a simple web server that lets you run your own on-premises GitHub Pages-like hosting service.

Happy Earth Day DC! This week there are meetups and events on a wide range of topics including mobile user experience design, data visualization, business development, and more. Tonight Data Visualization DC kicks off the nationwide Big Data Week with their meetup at iStrategyLabs. And if you happen to be in the Chicago area this weekend, join Alex Barth and Tom MacWright from our team at Chicago Hack Week Friday April 26th through Sunday April 28th.

Here's our roundup of technology events happening this week in Washington, DC. Check back every Monday for the latest happenings in the local tech scene..

Monday, April 22

6:30 pm - 8:30 pm

Data Visualization DC: This month, Data Visualization DC, as part of Big Data Week, will feature a presentation by Professor Ben Shneiderman at their Big Data Visualization meetup. Shneiderman will talk about "Information Visualization for Knowledge Discovery: Turning Messy BigData into Actionable SmallData".

6:30 pm - 9:30 pm

Startup Grind DC: This month's Startup Grind DC features a presentation by Dr. Magid Abraham, CEO and cofounder of the Internet Market Intellegence company comScore. Come learn how he built comScore into a leading internet company. The event will be held at 1776.

8:30 pm - 1:30 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session @ UberOffices: This week's Nightowl meetup will be held at UberOffices in DC. Ram Singh of 10.io will be running a Lean Canvas business development group during the meetup to assist local startups in developing successful business models. As usual Bring Your Own Project and be prepared to be productive.

Tuesday, April 23rd

6:00 pm

MapStoryDC: The April MapStoryDC meetup will focus on building up the local DC MapStory.org database. If you are interested in the power of mapping and data visualization, come and put your head together with likeminded individuals to develop some more useful and informative MapStories for the DC region. Some great DC focused MapStories include Commuting by Bike in DC and History of DC Metro Lines.

Wednesday April 24th

6:00 pm

MoDevDC: To prepare for next month's MoDevUX 2013 conference, MoDevDC will focus on mobile UX, design, and interface. Samsung developers will also be joining the meetup to provide a look at some of the latest SDKs available from Samsung. As an added bonus, they will be giving away a Samsung Galaxy device to one lucky attendee!

Thursday, April 25

6:30 pm

OpenStackDC: Join the open source, cloud software builders of OpenStack for their meetup at The Warehouse Theater. This month, there will be talks on using OpenStack in several different capacities from Dr. Steve Crago of USC and the Information Sciences Institute, Drew Dimmick of HP Cloud Services, and more. There will also be an open floor discussion about scaling OpenStack.

Earlier this week we outlined how important it is to provide access for all users, regardless of ability, to the new Healthcare.gov. The website will also feature Spanish translations of all its content, another important step toward achieving full accessibility.

Usually, implementing translated content into a workflow can be a challenging task. Questions arise about administration and management of the content, URL structure, site UI and end user experience. In our latest code sprint on developing the new healthcare.gov, we're tackling this by focusing on creating a sustainable architecture for supporting translation and the workflow for publishing multiple translations.

How to set up a multi-lingual Jekyll site

Jekyll gives us the a lot of control over our site's structure, so we're imposing a structure that facilitates managing multilingual content. We developed a sustainable architecture by focusing on three key components:

1. adding and maintaining content,
2. translating site elements,
3. and seamless use for the end user.

Implementing multilingual support with Jekyll can be achieved by adding rules to govern how the site supports translation. Leveraging the YAML front matter for controlling page generation, we can create rules for metadata, url structure, posts with categories, custom paths, and site element translations.

Metadata

Every page is defined by a language key and Jekyll builds the site based on these keys and the structure. Metadata fields are used to define what layout and other information are used to generate a page. All posts must declare a layout and lang field:

---
layout: default
lang: en
---


URL Structure

Translated posts need to have an additional categories field that will be used in the URL. The url structure of healthecare.gov will look like /:categories/:filename-title. For translated content, the url will be /es/title-of-the-page.

---
layout: default
lang: es
categories:
- es
---


To keep the relationship between translations, both posts must use the same filename. Translated posts are nested in a directory with the language code as a subdirectory. Note, we do not translate file names, and they are never directly seen by end users of the website. This is so that they can be matched for editing in Prose.

/_posts/index.html
/_posts/es/index.html
/_posts/blog/2013-01-01-happy-new-year.md
/_posts/blog/es/2013-01-01-happy-new-year.md


Additional categories can be appended, but using the rule of declaring es first, followed by the necessary categories matching both es and en translations:

---
layout: default
lang: es
categories:
- es
- blog
---


Site Elements

Site elements like navigation items or UI controls need a translation as well and can be controlled by posts with global metadata. We tag this post with a translations tag. For any templates that have elements that need translation, we can assign load the global translation data by assigning site translations variable at the top of the page:

{% assign t = site.tags.translations[0] %}


A title element would then look like:

<h1>{{t.[page.lang].landing-page.title}}</h1>


Since each page has a page.lang value, we can find the value we're looking for in the appropriate language following this structure.

The global translations post includes translated version of the title, like this:

en:
landing-page:
title: 'Some Title'
es:
landing-page:
title: 'Título Ejemplo'


By leveraging these rules and managing translated content in posts and site wide translation files, we keep authoring content simple. Prose, can now be used to create and manage posts and content. The next version of Prose will also have new features to make this process even more easy for content authors. This workflow puts an emphasis on writing content and providing human-translated content across the site.

Next up

We're getting ready to release a Google Analytics plugin for Jekyll. It's a drop-in plugin that will allow you to sort the content on your Jekyll site by any Google Analytics data you specify. We're using it on healthcare.gov to sort content by popularity, so we can surface interesting and useful posts. We're also gearing up for a major new version of Prose, as Tristen outlined a few weeks ago.

Half way into building the new Healthcare.gov, a site to help Americans learn about and find affordable health insurance, we want to update you on an important aspect of designing a government website. Especially given the content of this site is about access to health care, it's incredibly important that it be accessible to all people.

Section 508 is a legal requirement that federal government websites have certain features to help people with disabilities understand them, sometimes while using assistive technology like screen readers.

We've been focusing on 508 testing and compliance from the start. With each code sprint, we're reviewing and addressing accessibility issues as the come up. This process is not native to developing a static website, but it's easy to do, because we're working with such a flexible and simple architecture. There is no rooting around modules and multiple layers of themes to find erroneous markup.

Accessibility as guidelines and law

Providing persons with disabilities access to content on the web or within an application is many times glossed over by developers and designers. A number of organizations and governing bodies, including the U.S. government, have created guidelines and standards in an effort to help ensure that nobody is discriminated when trying to access content on the web.

Section 508 is one standard that is U.S. law and guides much of the public sector content on the web. The World Wide Web Consortium (W3C) is another body that has developed guidelines for web content accessibility, which corresponds to much of what Section 508 states. While slight differences exist, overall any guideline states that accessible web content include: text alternatives, keyboard-navigable layouts, meaningful page titles, logical header and sub header progression, and readable content.

In general this is a matter of applying standard HTML syntax — include alt tags, make sure your page is structured, and make sure you label elements.

But as Austin Seraphin writes, in a powerful blog post, "The blind have gotten so used to lofty promises of a dream platform, only to receive some slapped together set of software with a minimally functional screen reader running on overpriced hardware which can’t take a beating."

Auditing ourselves

Our first review using several in-browser accessibility tools, including WAVE from WebAIM, revealed that our initial site development had several issues. We had over 24 accessibility violations and 12 warnings. Most of the errors were due to missing alt text or unlabeled form elements. The warnings mostly dealt with dropdown menus, header items, and javascript interactions — items that some screen readers and accessibility software can't handle.

Take for example a search form element at the top of your page. A quick implementation would look something like this:

<form>
<input id='footer-email' type='text' placeholder='Email Address' />
</form>


This is one of the most common errors when trying to provide accessible content. A visually-impaired person using a screen-reader will not be able to understand this element because it lacks not only a label element attached to the form element, there is not a title to the form element.

To fix it, a label and/or title can be added as for descriptions of the elements.

<form>
<label for='footer-email'>Get Email Updates</label>
<input title='Email Signup Text Box' id='footer-email' type='text' placeholder='Email Address' />
</form>


Putting a focus on accessibility through simplicity

As we've discussed before, going back to the basics and using static site development can help improve accessibility. Our initial audit was the first step in reviewing how we can make the new Healthcare.gov 100% accessible regardless of disability.

Ensuring accessibility can be difficult. A number of considerations must be integrated during original development to ensure that standards are met.

Many times, large CMS-driven sites miss the mark. I audited several large government sites and have consistently found anything from 1 to 16 errors. In general, the most common offense is missing alt text or label for a form. But poor structure, confusing titles, or poor text contrast are also very common warnings that are not necessarily in violation of compliance but decrease access to certain users.

Managing these issues up front and with the simplicity of site templating features from Jekyll, we're seeing how easy it can be to make sure that the new Healthcare.gov is 100% accessible.

Next up

Later this week, we'll dive into another topic about access to content: how to set up a multi-lingual Jekyll site.

This week's meetups fall into two categories - the thriving startup and commercial tech communities in the city and the open data movement with this Saturday's OpenStreetMap Editathon. Read on for details on each of our event picks for the week, and check back every Monday for a weekly event roundup.

Monday, April 15

8:30 pm - 1:30 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session: The DC Nightowls are holding their after hours productivity session this week at 1776. Bring your own project and plan to work alongside other entrepreneurs. This week's tip? RSVP and show up early, the new venue is drawing a crowd.

Tuesday, April 16

7:00 pm

NetSquared DC: April's NetSquared meetup is featuring the "Best of NTC & SXSW". The meetup will include discussions about this year's SXSW conference as well as the Nonprofit Technology Conference. If you missed the live shows, come and join for a recap of each event's highlights.

Thursday, April 18

6:30 - 8:00

.Gov to .Com - Working in Commercial Technology: This event will feature presentations about the often overlooked commercial software and startup technology sectors in DC. Come and learn about this growing community from talented engineers and developers from around the region.

7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Tech in the City: Continuing the exploration of DC's growing startup scene, this event will feature private and public sector officials discussing smart growth and development, and the benefits of starting a tech company in DC. Come hear about how tech startups are making this city great!

Saturday April 20

12:00 pm - 5:00 pm

OpenStreetMap #Editathon : MapBox is hosting a mapping party as part of the OpenStreetMap US spring #editathon series. Come out to improve road coverage on the map, work with the new iD editor, or map your hometown. People of all skill levels are welcome.

Last week UNHCR, the United Nation's Refugee Agency, launched a new iteration of data.unhcr.org, along with a significant redesign to its information sharing portals. Providing open data has become a critical tool in UNHCR's response to refugee crises. With 1 million refugees now in Syria, the largest current situation, UNHCR is providing data and operations information through data.unhcr.org to improve coordination and the overall on-the-ground response.

This redesign marks the first release of the work we've been doing with the UNHCR GIS and data team. Here's a quick recap of what's new and a sneak peak at what's to come.

A new data.unhcr.org

The homepage for data.unhcr.org now features a fullscreen global map showing current active emergencies that UNHCR is responding to along with direct access points to the information sharing portals.

Full screen map showing locations active emergencies and information portal links.

Relaunch and redesign of UNHCR open data portals

Information portals provide a critical access and coordination point for UNHCR and its operational partners, as well as serve as the primary resource for up-to-date data about demographics and operations around a crises. The redesign refreshed critical UI components to improve the experience in accessing and using the portal, and is the first step in improving the way UNHCR shares data with its partners and the public.

A view of the Syria Regional Refugee Response page.

What's to come

Last week's launch of the improved homepage and rebranding of information portals is just the beginning of the work UNHCR has planned. Here's what else is in the works.

1. Improved situation map on portal pages

The situation map provides much needed geographical context into an emergency. Key demographic data and operational data can be shown as an overview to the situation and provide quick access to the data. In addition to a redesign of the map, more data layers will be available to browse including demographic data at the camp and regional level, along with operational data showing relief activities and critical infrastructure data.

2. Custom embeds of situation map

The situation map will have custom embed options to quickly integrate its data outside of the information portal. These embeds will give anyone the ability to quickly integrate current maps and data into their own site, news articles, or blog posts.

3. New layers on data.unhcr.org

The landing page for data.unhcr.org will be updated with new layers outlining current global data and activities. These new layers will provide an initial understanding of where and how UNHCR is responding to refugee crises around the world and serve as a portal to global information about humanitarian crises.

4. Data API

Demographic and operational datasets will be available for download and as JSON & GeoJSON endpoints in a fully built out API. The same data that powers the maps will be fully available for integration into an application or visualization. This furthers the ability to provide coordination with direct access to data.

It's been awesome working with the UNHCR team and helping them improve a critical resource in emergency operations. To learn more or donate to the work UNHCR is doing in Syria and around the world, visit donate.unhcr.org.

For many of the sites we build Jekyll is a prominent tool we use to build dynamic sites served by static pages. When we launched Prose last year, we set out to build a lightweight editor to create and manage Jekyll sites hosted on GitHub. We open sourced Prose, and the response from the GitHub community was overwhelming. Prose is a project with over 900 followers, and many actively use it each day.

Along with the relaunch of Healthcare.gov in June, we will dedicate time to improving the user experience and reliability of Prose, as well as adding new features.

This new version will also establish a clear direction to move forward - to make Prose a great interface for authoring content. We will focus Prose entirely on writing Markdown based documents, streamlining the interface for content creators.

A New Interface

As part of envisioning a new version of Prose, we have started on wireframes. You can view the entire set on Flickr, and below are an early look at key screens.

Authenticated Landing Page

For logged in users, the landing page features a filterable directory of projects per organization.

Project Page Settings

The project settings panel controls page deletion, publishes modes, and sets front matter values in clean form fields populated by a project schema.

Project Page Settings Prototype

Here’s a more detailed version of the page settings panel with vertical navigation.

These wires should represent an interface that has a good balance between users belonging to many projects and organizations or just one. Filenames and directories should be quickly scannable and filterable through autocomplete search. Filenames can be long and there can be many per directory. The interface should scale to accommodate volume and have subtle styled queues when content would otherwise overflow. The main navigation in the wires is presented in a vertical format and split into page level sections. It scales depending on the context of the page:

Main Navigation
- Authenticated Landing

Project Navigation

• Project Page
• Create New File

Page Navigation

• Editing
• Preview
• Media/Assets
• Page Settings

New features

Prose already provides the ability to specify configurable options in _conifg.yml

auto: true
server: true
prose:
rooturl: '_posts'
metadata:
- name: layout
field:
element: select
defaultText: 'Select a Layout'
options:
- value: default
- value: page

We want to expand on this by providing developers a way to specify a project schema in YAML that props up a sandboxed world of a site, free of system files. A metadata schema provides helpful defaults to YAML front matter, specifies an element type, and lists out values available to the site. Other ideas include specifying an assets directory for images or media.

We will also enhance the editing interface overall, including improving markup formatting and building out a simple mechanism to drop in images or media into a page.

Stay tuned. Work will begin in the master branch of Prose on GitHub - watch there for new development.

Prose users: Let us know your thoughts over on GitHub

At a South by Southwest event this weekend, Department of Heath and Human Services CTO Bryan Sivak outlined a new vision for healthcare.gov. As the primary interface for the public to learn about and shop for health insurance plans through the Health Insurance Marketplace, healthcare.gov will relaunch this June with a completely rethought design and architecture.

The new healthcare.gov follows our CMS-free philosophy. It will be a completely static website, generated by Jekyll, moving away from content management systems, which Bryan describes as “complicated to configure, complicated to setup, and add unnecessary overhead.” Website generators like Jekyll work by combining template files with content and rendering them to static html pages. They provide the best balance between content creation and editing flexibility, serving an incredibly fast and reliable website.

The code for the website will be open in two important ways. First, Bryan pledged, “everything we do will be published on GitHub,” meaning the entire code-base will be available for reuse. This is incredibly valuable because some states will set up their own state-based health insurance marketplaces. They can easily check out and build upon the work being done at the federal level. GitHub is the new standard for sharing and collaborating on all sorts of projects, from city geographic data and laws to home renovation projects and even wedding planning, as well as traditional software projects.

Moreover, all content will be available through a JSON API, for even simpler reusability. Other government or private sector websites will be able to use the API to embed content from healthcare.gov. As official content gets updated on healthcare.gov, the updates will reflect through the API on all other websites. The White House has taken the lead in defining clear best practices for web APIs.

Healthcare.gov content editors will use an improved Prose.io to create and manage content across the site. We’re working with HHS to determine priorities for Prose, including better previewing, a refined user interface, and a user-friendly metadata editor. The enhancements will roll out over the next few months leading up to the relaunch of healthcare.gov.

Eschewing the complexity of a content management system frees time to invest in a better design and content experience, as well as greatly simplifies the maintenance overhead of running a website. We estimate the cms-free healthcare.gov will require approximately 30 less servers than current cms-based implementations in the department. That’s because no matter how many visits the website gets, we only require one server to pre-generate the website’s content and push it to a content distribution network for public access.

We’re excited to partner with the HHS team to offer strategic support for a completely new and open source healthcare.gov. And as employees of a small business, we can’t wait to use the new health insurance marketplace at the beginning of next year to access more affordable health insurance options.

We’ll post more updates over the next few months as this project develops.

As Reuters just reported, Guinea is opening up all mining contracts. ContratsMiniersGuinee.org is the new open data sites opening more than 70 historical mining contracts, including the contracts signed under the military rule before president Alpha Conde’s 2010 election. This open data push is part of the Government’s technical committee to review mining contracts - and will be the place where all future mining contracts are published. We worked with Revenue Watch and the World Bank, the main advisors to the Guinean Government, to create the site - our goal was to make it easy to navigate and sorted though all these PDFs.

Leveraging Document Cloud

The site was all built on Document Cloud, a great open source project that enables interaction and direction for what can often be unnavigable PDFs.

The government can now easily maintain all the mining contracts by simply uploading them to their own Document Cloud account, where they can then use the powerful annotation and tagging tools that Document Cloud opens up. All documents have metadata attached to them via Document Cloud’s API, letting us build an light filtering interface to search and filter documents by year, resource type, and contract type, as seen on the document listing page below.

All annotations to the contracts are linked, letting users jump right into the highlighted parts of the contracts, something traditionally really hard to do with PDFs. Click the image below to jump to the document preview page, which provides a jumping point into any section of the contract.

Building static sites

The open source work of Document Cloud, first funded by the Knight Foundation, powers our continued move towards building light static sites integrating productized software services. As Dave Cole recently blogged about, we have shifted our focus to building static sites with tools like Jekyll or Backbone.js instead of CMS-driven applications.

This gives us the room to focus on design and performance, while depending on the open source community and hosted services for tools that give us dynamic content integration. We anticipate many more opportunities to power our sites with Document Cloud as additional governments and organizations move towards transparent reporting.

As usual there is a lot going on in the technology space this week in Washington, DC, from lighting talks on big geodata to social co-working to nerdy drinking. Below is our roundup of events happening this week. Check back every week for a summary of the local technology events that caught our eye.

Tuesday, February 5

6:30 - 8:00 pm

Beers & Betas 3: Hinge: Like new apps, devices, ideas, and beer? Come out for this event to be pitched by a local startup, asked for your feedback on the tool, and given beer to loosen your lips.

Wednesday, February 6

7:00 - 9:00 pm

GeoDC Meetp: This month’s GeoDC meetup is all about big geo data, with talks on data scaling, data styling, and data visualizing and analyzing. Come out to learn something new and meet folks interested in mapping, GIS, and geography.

8:30 pm - 2:00 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session: Check out Canvas.co and nclud’s co-working space while spending some time working on your latest idea with a group of other hard workers and entrepreneurs at this late night co-working session.

Saturday, February 9

9:00 am - 5:00 pm

ErlangDC: Come out to this one day conference all on Erlang that will intro you to the basics of the Erlang programming language or let you deep dive into hands on workshops and discussions for the more experienced.

6:30 pm

Nerd Nite DC: Like to kick off your Saturday night by learning something? This month’s Nerd Nite will teach you about nerds in love, space dust, bilingualism on the brain, and the impending superbug of doom, with bursts of local music in between.

Want to give coding in Python a try, meet other women working in geo, learn about linked data, or just work with some like-minded creators? These technology events and more are happening this week in Washington, DC. Read on for details, and check back weekly for our roundup of local technology events.

Monday, January 28

8:30 pm - 2:00 am

DC Nightowls Coworking Session: Want to pitch your latest idea to creators and entrepreneurs, and get some work done on it? Check out this co-working session to be held at Uber’s offices.

Tuesday, January 29

6:00 - 8:00 pm

Women in GIS Happy Hour: This happy hour will bring together ladies working in mapping, geography, cartography, and related fields. Come out to share your experience and meet others in the space.

6:30 - 8:30 pm

Linked Data Meetup: Want to learn more about the linked data model and related best practices for publishing data online? Come out for this meetup for a practical talk about linked data and how and why you should use it.

Saturday, February 2

1:30 pm

DC PyLadies Hack Day: Want to dive into Python? Come out for this hack day to meet other female Python programmers, go through some tutorials, or share what you know with the group. All skill levels welcome.

While Washington, DC is calming down after a weekend of Inauguration festivities, the local tech scene is heating back up after the holidays. There are meetups this week on Node.js, jQuery, and international development technology, plus a full weekend of events with the OpenStreetMap editathon plus more hackathon and social coding gatherings. Below is our roundup of events happening this week in Washington, DC.

Wednesday, January 23

6:00 - 8:00 pm

DevCliches Happy Hour: We’ve all heard an elevator pitch or project idea that sounds, well familiar. This is your chance to have fun with the all too familiar practice, and learn what not to say to make yourself stand out from the crowd in the international development space.

7:00 pm

NodeDC Meetup: Interested in node.js and building fast applications in the server-side JavaScript environment? Come out for talks on how to get started using node in production, what’s new in node streams, and to see some fun examples of it use.

Thursday, January 24

6:00 - 8:00 pm

DC jQuery Meetup: This month’s jQuery meetup will look at how the Atlantic Wire’s HTML5 iPad app was built. Expect a technical walk through on how the app was architected and developed, and the challenges and successes that developers ran into along the way.

Saturday, January 26

9:00 - 4:00 pm

Domestic Violence Hackathon: Interested in putting your technical and design skills to use building tools to help combat and help with the aftermath of domestic violence? Hackathon events will take place in six Latin American countries and Washington, DC this weekend.

10:00 am

DC Python Group Coding Session: Want to help the Python project while honing your coding skills with a group of other Python developers? Come out to this social coding session to get some work done while meeting new people.

Noon - 6:00 pm

OpenStreetMap Editathon: Communities all over the United States will be getting together to make map coverage on OpenStreetMap better this weekend. Come out to improve your town, enter road and directional data, and whatever else is needed while learning how to improve OpenStreetMap and how to use its free data. We’ll be hosting the DC event at the MapBox office.