Dana Lewis

Dana Lewis

After building her own DIY “artificial pancreas,” Dana Lewis helped found the open source artificial pancreas movement (known as “OpenAPS”), making safe and effective artificial pancreas technology available (sooner) for people with diabetes around the world. She’s working to scale patient-led innovation and scientific discovery in more patient communities, and is the Principal Investigator of the Opening Pathways project.

Everything is open source

1 minute read Updated:

Everything in this project is and will be open source.

Most people think that means the final output of the project will be open source. But it also means all of our work “products” and efforts along will be open source as well.

This website (www.OpeningPathways.org) is included in that.

I knew when we launched the project site that I wanted the content of the website to be open source, too. I knew Github had options for web pages, and decided to use Github Pages. From there, I realized there were some easy options with Jekyll to design the site. Although Github Pages has some default templates, I wanted something different. Skimming through the examples and related documentation, I chose Michael Rose’s Minimal Mistakes theme.

One of the other reasons I like Michael’s MM theme was that it supported multiple comment options, including Staticman. Staticman by Eduardo Boucas is a static comment system that uses Github. All comments are stored in Github, so it’s also completely open source. (Our comments will be under the _data/comments folder.) And the work Michael did with the MM theme means we can have sub-threaded comments.

The MM theme documentation is awesome. I highly recommend it for anyone who’s exploring open source web design. (It works even for us non-traditional developers!) And Michael’s personal site, mademistakes.com, also has some other great design elements in it. It’s not all default in the MM theme; but his site is also available publicly on Github. So, between his blog posts (like this one on how he uses Staticman) and sleuthing his repository, I was able to add a comment count to the top of each blog post, as well as in the preview on the blog archive page and anywhere where recommended blog posts show up.

So, that’s some background on the backbones of the site. As we finish some other backend process work in preparing our data science team and some other work, you’ll see more blog posts soon about some of our team’s other work in progress; updates on the data science work including how to work with the project; and more.

Thanks for your interesting in the Opening Pathways project!

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