About the Website Technical Overview and Acknowledgements

This website is dependent on a number of free/libre software projects and aims to make its contents available using open standards. These are detailed here to acknowledge that debt and to highlight these projects for any readers who are technically interested.

Code created for the Irish Left Archive project is available on Github, including this website frontend, some Javascript modules, scripts etc. Interested readers are welcome to browse or reuse this code.

View Irish Left Archive repositories on Github

Open Standards

Open Standards in metadata allow different software to share information in a mutually intelligible way (in contrast with proprietary formats and standards, which commonly can only be read by specific commercial applications).

The archive makes use of Schema.org  structured markup to add semantic, machine-readable metadata describing organisations, publications, people etc. to our pages where relevant.

Document pages also includes COinS  and Dublin Core  bibliographic metadata, which allows software such as Zotero  and others to automatically read bibliographic information from each respective page, making it easier to add items to bibliography managing software.

Both the social media account @ILA@leftarchive.ie and the podcast @ILAPodcast@podcast.leftarchive.ie use the ActivityPub  open protocol to interact with federated social media (the ‘Fediverse ’). The podcast implements the open Podcast 2.0 specification established by PodcastIndex .

Free/Libre Software

The website uses a number of Free/libre software projects. Free/libre software allows the user to use, share and modify it, without the restrictions of proprietary software ¹. We have also made some of our own custom elements available under the GPLv3 licence, which can be found on Github .

The core of the site is built with Symphony CMS  - an open source (MIT licensed) CMS which provides the site administration area and allows construction of a custom frontend with XSLT.

The frontend (i.e the pages visible to visitors) uses Bootstrap  for much of its layout and visual design.

Beyond the construction of the site itself, it runs, like much of the web, on a server that uses free/libre software projects in a combination often abbreviated to LAMP (GNU/Linux, Apache, MariaDB and PHP).

Fediverse

The Irish Left Archive Fediverse  account @ila@leftarchive.ie uses Microblog.pub  — a custom software for running a federated social media account, which can interact with ActivityPub platforms such as Mastodon, Pixelfed etc., and is licensed under the AGPLv3.

Podcast

The Irish Left Archive Podcast website uses Castopod , a free software podcast hosting platform, which also enables ActivityPub interaction, licensed under the AGPLv3.

Javascript

The Timeline of the Irish Left uses a custom JS module created for the site, which is available under GPLv3, as well as some external libraries.

A number of free software javascript libraries provide additional frontend functionality for the rest of the website. Our own custom UI elements are also available under the GPLv3.