FAQ – Introduction to Data Analysis with R for Social Science

General

Where can I get help?: Mail us at team@carpentries.org, or join our discussion list and ask for help there.
What if I can’t wait?: Run make workshop-check to run the workshop homepage checking program on index.html.
Where can I report problems or suggest improvements?: Please file an issue against https://github.com/carpentries/workshop-template or mail us.
Why does the workshop repository have to be created by importing rather than forking?: Because any particular user can only have one fork of a repository, but instructors frequently need to work on several workshops at once.
Why do I have to be logged in before I start the import?: It’s a known issue with GitHub’s importer.
Why does the workshop repository name have to follow the YYYY-MM-DD-site pattern?: This makes it easy for coordinators to track workshops. There are plans to move that coordination into AMY, but until that happens this pattern makes it easy to sort workshops by date without requiring an additional start-date column. Note: YYYY-MM-DD should be the start date of the workshop.
Why use the gh-pages branch instead of master?: Because GitHub automatically publishes gh-pages as a website.
Why use Jekyll? Why not some other markup language and some other converter?: Because it’s the only tool supported by GitHub Pages.
Where should pages go if multiple workshops are running at a site simultaneously?: Use subdirectories like 2015-07-01-esu/beginners, so that repository names always follow our four-part convention.
What if I want to add more values to index.html, like address1 and address2 for different rooms on different days?: Go ahead, but you must have the variables described in the customization instructions.
What is the “Windows installer”?: We have built a small installation helper for Windows that installs nano and SQLite, adds R to the path, and so on. It is maintained in https://github.com/swcarpentry/windows-installer which also has an up-to-date description of what it actually does. The latest version is always available at http://files.software-carpentry.org/SWCarpentryInstaller.exe, and contributions are always welcome.

Debugging

Help, my website is not updating!

Ensure that strings in the header of index.html are enclosed in quotations ". Special characters such as "&" may render correctly on your local machine but cause rendering to fail silently on GitHub.

Eventbrite registration isn’t showing up on the workshop’s home page.

First check that you have something like:

eventbrite: 1234567890AB

in the YAML header of index.html. If the YAML header is set properly you may be accessing file:///home/to/workshop/directory/_site/index.html directly. Instead, please run

$ make serve

and look at http://localhost:4000 in your browser (or push your changes to GitHub and view your page there).

What do I do if I see a invalid byte sequence in ... error when I run tools/check?

Your computer is telling you that it doesn’t understand some of the characters you’re using. Declare your locale to be en_US.UTF-8 in your shell:

$ export LC_ALL=en_US.UTF-8
$ export LANG=en_US.UTF-8

What do I do if I get a “can’t convert nil into String” error?

On some Linux distributions (e.g, Ubuntu 14.04), you may get this error:

$ ./tools/preview
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/rubygems/custom_require.rb:36:in `require': iconv will be deprecated in the future, use String#encode instead.
/usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/time.rb:265:in `_parse': can't convert nil into String (TypeError)
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/time.rb:265:in `parse'
    from /usr/bin/jekyll:95:in `block (2 levels) in <main>'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/optparse.rb:1391:in `call'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/optparse.rb:1391:in `block in parse_in_order'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/optparse.rb:1347:in `catch'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/optparse.rb:1347:in `parse_in_order'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/optparse.rb:1341:in `order!'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/optparse.rb:1432:in `permute!'
    from /usr/lib/ruby/1.9.1/optparse.rb:1453:in `parse!'
    from /usr/bin/jekyll:137:in `<main>'

This occurs because you are using an old version of Jekyll located in /usr/bin. Make sure that you have installed Jekyll using:

$ gem install jekyll

This installs Jekyll in /usr/local/bin, so make sure this directory comes before /usr/bin in your PATH environment variable. When your path is set correctly, you should see:

$ which jekyll
/usr/local/bin/jekyll

You may also have to install the nodejs package to disable references to JavaScript, which you can do using:

$ sudo apt-get install nodejs

For more information, see http://michaelchelen.net/81fa/install-jekyll-2-ubuntu-14-04/.