DIY Trove Exhibition

With nothing more than Trove and a GitHub account you can create your own online exhibition in minutes!

See a live exhibition using this repository here:

http://wragge.github.io/forecasters-demo/

Before you get started you'll need to have some Trove lists ready to provide the content for your exhibition. Trove lists are just collections of items found on Trove -- they're easy to create, manage, and edit.

The demo above uses three lists:

• A day in the life of Mr Mares, weatherman
• Clement Wragge
• Inigo Jones

You could create an exhibition with just one list, but it's probably better to divide your content between a number of lists. Each list is displayed as a 'topic' in the exhibition.

Once you have your lists, just follow the quickstart instructions below!

Quickstart

1. Get yourself a GitHub account (the free version is fine) and log in.
2. Get yourself a Trove API key.
3. Come back to this page and click on the 'Fork' button (in the top right hand corner of the page) to save a copy of this repository under your own account. More about forking.
4. Go to your account and view the repository you've just created. It will look just like this one!
5. Click on the 'Settings' tab and change the repository name to suit your exhibition.
6. Click on the 'Code' tab and then on the index.html file to open it.
7. Click on the pencil icon to edit the file.
8. Look for the 'EDIT THIS SECTION TO INCLUDE YOUR EXHIBITION DETAILS' message in the index.html file and add the details of your exhibition as described in the customisation section below.
9. Click on the 'Commit changes' button to save your details.
10. That's it! Your hew exhibition will be available at the address -- http://[your Github user name].github.io/[your repository name]. For example, my user account is 'wragge' and I created a version of this repository called 'forecasters-demo', so you can find it online at http://wragge.github.io/forecasters-demo/ .

Customisation guide

There are six blocks of information you need to add or edit in the index.html file:

• Your exhibition's name
• Your exhibition's tagline
• A description of your exhibition
• A brief 'About this exhibition' statement that lives in the site footer
• A list of the Trove lists that make up your exhibition
• Your Trove API key

There are samples of each of these (except the API key) in the index.html file. They all sit inside a block of HTML labelled 'EDIT THIS SECTION TO INCLUDE YOUR EXHIBITION DETAILS'.

This is the element that contains the exhibition name:

<h1 ng-hide="listHide" class="ng-hide" id="exhibition-name" class="page-header">Forecasters</h1>

Obviously you should change 'Forecasters' to the name of your exhibition, but leave the rest of the tag and its attributes alone.

This is the element that contains the exhibition tagline:

<h2 ng-hide="listHide" class="ng-hide" id="exhibition-tagline">An assortment of weather prophets</h2>

As above, just change the text but leave the rest of the tag and its attributes alone.

The exhibition description is a little different:

<div ng-hide="listHide" class="ng-hide" id="exhibition-description">
    <p>This site displays content from Trove. It is a demonstration of how resources collected using <a href="http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/using-trove/creating-contributing/lists">Trove lists</a> can be reused through the <a href="http://help.nla.gov.au/trove/building-with-trove">Trove API</a> to create new interfaces and applications.</p>
</div>

Leave the <div></div> tags alone, but in between them you can include whatever HTML code you want.

The exhibition credit is similar:

<div ng-hide="listHide" class="ng-hide" id="exhibition-credit">
    <p><small>This demonstration was created by <a href="http://discontents.com.au/about-me">Tim Sherratt</a> (<a href="http://twitter.com/wragge">@wragge</a>) to show how easy it is to create your own exhibition.</small></p>
</div>

You can change anything between the <div></div> tags, but to keep the formatting consistent it's best to enclose your text in <p><small></small></p> tags as demonstrated.

The list of lists is the most important thing you need to customise, without it your exhibition will have no content! Here's the example version:

<ul ng-hide="listHide" class="ng-hide" id="lists">
    <!-- CHANGE THIS TO LIST THE TROVE LISTS THAT MAKE UP YOUR EXHIBITION -->
    <li><a class="list-link" href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/list?id=43805">A day in the life of Mr Mares, weatherman</a></li>
    <li><a class="list-link" href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/list?id=83777">Clement Wragge</a></li>
    <li><a class="list-link" href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/list?id=83774">Inigo Jones</a></li>
</ul>

You'll see there are three Trove lists linked here. Each one looks like this:

<li><a class="list-link" href="http://trove.nla.gov.au/list?id=43805">A day in the life of Mr Mares, weatherman</a></li>

For each of your lists you need to add an <li></li> tag just like this. The href value should be the url of your list as it appears on Trove. Don't change the other attributes. Replace 'A day in the life of Mr Mares, weatherman' with the name of your list. Note, however, that this name is just a fallback -- the site will automatically grab the name of the list as it appears of Trove to use in the exhibition.

Finally, find the line that says:

var troveAPIKey = "";

Simply insert your Trove API key between the quotes.

Changing the look of your exhibition

By default your exhibition will be styled using Bootstrap and a slightly modified version of the Sandstone Bootswatch theme. The style information is contained within two files in the styles directory:

• theme.css -- includes all the basic Bootstrap stuff
• style.css -- a few extra customisations for the exhibition

If you're feeling brave you can dive in and edit theme.css to change things like colours and fonts. However, it's probably easier to use a site like the Bootstrap Live Customiser to create your own theme. You can start with the basic Bootstrap style or build on one of the Bootswatch themes. Once you've created your own custom theme, simply copy the CSS code into the theme.css file in your repository and commit the changes.

You'll probably also want to tweak style.css to match your custom theme.

The style is of course responsive by default, so it should look good on mobile devices. Try swiping one of the item pages!

More advanced customisation

It's possible to set up a custom domain to use for your exhibition.

Of course you don't have to use GitHub to host your exhibition. You can just copy the contents of your repository to any old webserver and it will just work.

If you want to change the page layout or navigation then you'll need to grab the full code repository and set up your local development environment using Node, Grunt, and AngularJS.

Limitations

Because of the way forking works on GitHub, you can only fork a repository once into your own account. That means you can only create one exhibition.

The easiest, but kludgiest, way around this is to create a new GitHub organisation, and then fork your second exhibition into your new organisation's account. To create a new organisation just click on the '+' sign at the top of the screen and choose 'New organisation'.

If you're making lots of exhibitions you probably want to install Git on your local computer and follow the instructions below.

Managing multiple exhibitions

As noted above, you can only create one exhibition using GitHub by itself. Yes, you can a new organisation for every exhibition, but that's going to get messy quickly. Fortunately it's easy to set things up on your local computer so that you can create as many exhibitions as you want!

The first step is to install Git on your local computer.

Once that's done, just follow the following steps each time you want to create a new exhibition:

1. You'll need to use the command line, so fire up a terminal.
2. On the command line type git clone https://github.com/wragge/diy-trove-exhibition.git mynewexhibition -- replacing 'mynewexhibition' with whatever you want. This command will create a directory called mynewexhibition and copy all the files from the DIY-Trove-Exhibition repository on GitHub into it.
3. Type cd mynewexhibition to move to the new directory.
4. Now you have to create a new repository in your own GitHub account. Just login to your account, click on the '+' button at the top of the page, and choose 'New repository'. Give your repository a name (probably the same as the directory you just created) and click the green 'Create repository' button.
5. Go back to your terminal and type git remote rename origin upstream -- this changes the name of the link to the original repository.
6. Now you need the address of your new repository. On your new repository's page you should see a url that starts with https://github.com/ and ends in .git -- copy it.
7. In the terminal type git remote add origin [your repository's url] -- inserting the url you just copied. This will link the repository on your local machine with your new repository on GitHub.
8. Type git push -u origin gh-pages -- this copies the repository on your local machine to GitHub.

Now you have a choice, you can edit the files as described above in your new GitHub repository. Or you can use the text editor of your choice to modify the files on your local computer. If you edit them locally, you'll need to copy your modified files to GitHub to see your exhibition. At the terminal just type git push origin gh-pages -- easy!

Using HTTPS

On 15 June 2016, GitHub Pages started using https for all new repositories. For security reasons most browsers will block content in a https page that comes from non-https sources. Unfortunately, the Trove API is not available via https, so calls to the API will be blocked and the application will not load the list data. To get around this, I've created a simple proxy server. The proxy server is available via https, so can receive the query, forward it on to the Trove API, and return the results to the exhibition. You shouldn't notice any difference in the way the application works.

If, however, you're hosting your exhibition on a non-https server, you might want to make your requests directly to the Trove API. To do this, simply change the https configuration variable from true to false.

More examples

Here are some exhibitions created by others:

• The Chinese in New South Wales: A history in pictures to 1940 -- see Kate Bagnall's blog post describing how she created this exhibition.
• Explore Canberra in Trove
• A tour of the Southern Highlands