VIB Data Core — announcements

Public notice board for the services run by VIB Data Core: https://vib-data-core.github.io/status

Everything on that page comes from Markdown files in this repository. Posting an announcement means adding one file — no HTML, no CSS, no build step on your side.

Quick start: post an announcement

Copy _announcements/TEMPLATE.md to a new file next to it and edit it. On GitHub: open the template, Copy raw file, then in _announcements/ click Add file → Create new file, name it YYYY-MM-DD-short-slug.md — for example 2026-09-19-project-storage-slow.md — and paste.

---
title: Slower than usual access to Project Storage
start: 2026-09-19 09:30:00
type: unplanned
services_affected:
  - project-storage
summary: >-
  One or two sentences shown on the card and in the history.
---

Markdown body

Leave end: out entirely while it is still going on. When it is over, edit the same file and add the end time:

end: 2026-09-19 18:00:00

For planned work, set type: planned and give both start and end up front:

---
title: Planned maintenance of the Electronic Lab Notebook
start: 2026-10-06 19:00:00
end: 2026-10-06 23:00:00
type: planned
services_affected:
  - eln
summary: >-
  The Electronic Lab Notebook is unavailable for about four hours.
---

The page rebuilds automatically after the change lands on main.

Updates during a long announcement

A long-running announcement can carry a list of updates. Newest first or oldest first, both work; the page sorts them. The most recent update is also shown on the card on the landing page.

updates:
  - time: 2026-09-20 11:00:00
    body: >-
      Performance has improved for most users.
  - time: 2026-09-19 10:15:00
    body: >-
      We are aware of the slower access and are looking into it.

Front matter reference

Field	Required	Type	Notes
title	yes	text	Keep it under ~90 characters. Describe the impact, not the cause.
start	yes	date-time	Unquoted, no timezone offset: 2026-09-19 09:30:00. Always Belgian local time — summer and winter time are handled for you.
end	no	date-time	Omit while it is still going on. Once it is in the past, the entry moves to the history page.
type	yes	keyword	unplanned or planned.
services_affected	yes	list	Ids from _data/services.yml. Unknown ids fail the build check.
summary	recommended	text	One or two sentences, shown on cards and in the history.
updates	no	list	Chronological updates during a long announcement, each one a time and a body. See the commented-out block in the template.

Times carry no offset because every time on this page is Belgian local time. _plugins/local_times.rb reads them that way; YAML would otherwise take a bare time for UTC and the page would move the entry an hour or two late.

Services

Defined in _data/services.yml, and they mirror the Data Core catalogue (the services listed in Connect). One announcement can cover several of them. Use the id in front matter; the name is what readers see:

- id: project-storage
  name: Project Storage
  description: Laboris nisi ut aliquip ex ea commodo consequat.

The description only surfaces as the tooltip on a service chip, and the ones checked in are placeholder text — replace them with the catalogue wording.

If the catalogue gains a service, add it here in the same change. Ids are lowercase with dashes and should not change afterwards — they appear in shareable filter links such as /history/?services=project-storage,usegalaxy.

Working on it locally

You need Ruby (3.1+) and Node (18+).

bundle install     # Jekyll and friends
npm install        # Tailwind CLI

npm run serve      # builds the CSS, watches it, and serves on http://localhost:3002/status/

Other commands:

npm run css        # one-off, minified stylesheet
npm run build      # CSS + full Jekyll build into _site/
npm run validate   # check all entries against the vocabularies

assets/css/main.css is generated and git-ignored — never edit it by hand, edit assets/css/tailwind.css instead.

Checks on every change

script/validate.rb runs in CI and fails on:

• missing title, start or type
• an unknown type, or a retired severity:/kind: key
• quoted or malformed date-times, and an end before the start
• a Z or +00:00 offset on a time, which is indistinguishable from a bare Belgian local time and would silently shift the entry by an hour or two
• missing or unknown service ids
• malformed updates entries

It also prints warnings (empty body, missing summary, odd file name) that do not block the change.

Licence

Code in this repository is MIT licensed (see LICENSE).