News & vacancies

The News page has two parts:

• News articles: full stories with their own page, written in Markdown in the marc_news repository (opens in a new tab). Vacancies are news articles too. Send them with the news form (no GitHub account needed) or add them on GitHub.
• Social feed items: short entries that link out to a Facebook, LinkedIn or web post, added as rows in the website data Google Sheet.

Use the news form

• New article: give the title, the date, a one- or two-sentence summary and the full text. Each line of the text becomes a paragraph, and lines starting with - become a list.
• Photos: a cover photo, and optionally more photos shown under the article, with one line in Descriptions of the other photos for each, in the same order. Photos are resized and their camera and location data removed. Only send photos MARC may publish, with the agreement of anyone recognisable in them.
• Vacancy: answer Yes and give the deadline and an application link or email address.
• Correcting a published article: choose Change a published article, paste the article’s link from the website, and fill in only what should change. New text replaces the whole text (the photos are kept), so paste the full corrected version. The article’s address never changes.

Every night at midnight (Sri Lanka time) your answers become a change request. It goes live once a MARC maintainer approves it. If something can’t be used, for example a link that doesn’t match an article, a maintainer will be in touch.

The rest of this guide is for adding articles on GitHub, and explains what each field means.

marc_news/
└── articles/
    ├── 2026-03-10-example-news.md
    └── cover_photos/
        └── 2026-03-10-example-news/
            ├── 01.jpg
            └── 02.jpg

Post a news article

1. Open the articles/ (opens in a new tab) folder and click Add file → Create new file.
2. Name the file after the date and a few words of the title, for example 2026-03-10-example-news.md. This becomes the address: /news/2026-03-10-example-news/.
3. Upload photos to articles/cover_photos/, ideally in a folder named like the article.
4. Commit to a new branch and open a pull request. When it is merged, the website rebuilds.

---
title: "MARC Researchers Win Best Paper Award"
date: 2026-03-10
cover: ./cover_photos/2026-03-10-example-news/01.jpg
short: "One or two sentences for the news card and the top of the article."
---

The full article, in Markdown.

## Photos

![The team receiving the award](./cover_photos/2026-03-10-example-news/02.jpg)

Field	Required	What it does
title	Yes	The headline. Must be unique across all articles.
date	Yes	Publication date, written exactly as YYYY-MM-DD. Articles are sorted by it, newest first.
short	Yes	The summary on the news card and under the headline.
cover	No	Cover photo, starting with ./cover_photos/. Landscape, at least 1200 pixels wide.

Describe every photo inside the square brackets (![what the photo shows](…)) so screen-reader users know what it shows.

Post a vacancy

A vacancy, internship or volunteer call is a news article with up to three extra fields:

---
title: "Research Assistant: Hyperspectral Imaging"
date: 2026-10-20
short: "MARC is looking for a Research Assistant to join the hyperspectral imaging team."
vacancy: true
deadline: 2026-11-30
apply: https://forms.gle/your-form
---

The role, who can apply, and how to apply.

Field	What it does
vacancy	true lists the article on the Vacancies page and tags it “Vacancy” in News.
deadline	Optional. Last day to apply, as YYYY-MM-DD.
apply	Optional. The application link: an https:// address (a form, for example) or a mailto: address. Adds an Apply button.

• The vacancy stays on the Vacancies page until the end of its deadline day (Sri Lanka time), then drops off by itself. The article stays in News and shows “Applications closed”.
• Without a deadline, it stays on the Vacancies page until you remove vacancy: true.
• deadline and apply can only be used together with vacancy: true.

Social feed items

Short updates that link to a post elsewhere go in the News tab of the website data Google Sheet (ask a maintainer for edit access). Each row is one item in the “Latest activity” list on the News page.

Column	Required	What to enter
Title	Yes	A short title for the post.
Date	Yes	YYYY-MM-DD.
Source	Yes	Exactly Facebook, LinkedIn, Web or Twitter.
URL	Yes	The full link to the post.
Thumbnail	No	Leave blank unless asked.
Embed	No	Leave blank unless asked.

Rows missing a Title, Date or URL are skipped. New rows appear after the next website rebuild.

Double-check Source, Date and URL: a misspelled source, a date in another format or an incomplete link stops the website from rebuilding until the row is fixed.

If the check fails

When you open a pull request, an automatic check validates every article. If it fails, open the Checks tab to see which file and field to fix. Common problems: a date not written as YYYY-MM-DD, a title already used by another article, a cover path that does not match the file, or an article saved outside the articles/ folder.

More detail: the marc_news README (opens in a new tab).