 ____       _          ____                        
|  _ \ ___ | |__   ___/ ___| _   _ _ __ ___   ___  
| |_) / _ \| '_ \ / _ \___ \| | | | '_ ` _ \ / _ \ 
|  _ < (_) | |_) | (_) |__) | |_| | | | | | | (_) |
|_| \_\___/|_.__/ \___/____/ \__,_|_| |_| |_|\___/ 
                                                   
  ____            _    _                 _    
 / ___|___   ___ | | _| |__   ___   ___ | | __
| |   / _ \ / _ \| |/ / '_ \ / _ \ / _ \| |/ /
| |__| (_) | (_) |   <| |_) | (_) | (_) |   < 
 \____\___/ \___/|_|\_\_.__/ \___/ \___/|_|\_\

Blog information and guidelines

You will document all your work on the RoboSumo project on an individual public blog, hosted on our own content management system (CMS), which is called Jotz CMS. In general, a CMS provides a web interface for creating new web content. Well known examples include Wordpress and Squarespace. Jotz CMS allows you to author blog posts (including titles, sections, links, paragraphs, bullet lists, numbered lists, images, embedded videos, code listings, etc.) using a very lightweight plain text markup language called Markdown, which is widely used for writing documents or other content in a plain text form that can be converted into multiple presentation formats (HTML web page, MS Word document, PDF, etc.). If you use github, you've probably seen that markdown is used for writing comments and documentation there.

How to log in to your Jotz CMS account

You should have received an email from accounts@robosumo.eu back in October 2023 containing your personal blog link and login details. The subject line of the email was "Jotz CMS login details for your account on robosumo.eu".

How to edit your blog on Jotz CMS

This is a short video tutorial explaining how to create and edit blog posts using Jotz CMS.

If you view the video on YouTube (rather than here in the embedded player), you'll find chapter links in the description, which let you jump to the specific section you need.

Blog deadline

The deadline for this semester's RoboSumo blogs is Friday 26-Apr-2024. That's the week after the RoboSumo final tournament.

No class in the final week

There will be no RoboSumo class on Wed 24-Apr-2024. We suggest you use the normal class time to complete your blog.
I'll be keeping an eye on my emails on the afternoon of Wed 24-Apr, in case anyone is having technical issues with their blog. If you need assistance, email me and myself or one of the other RoboSumo lab instructors will get in touch to assist.

Frequently asked questions:

Do I need to submit my blog somewhere? No, your Jotz CMS blog is a public web page and we just grade them by reading them on the web the same way any other visitor on the web would read them.
Do I need to submit something other than my Jotz CMS blog? I've heard something about Wordpress? No, your entire documentation for Track TT, RoboSumo, and anything else you did as part of this project is to be written on your Jotz CMS blog. In previous years, we used Wordpress for the student blogs, so you might have read something about that on some old documentation, but you can ignore that. Everything you write is on Jotz CMS.
How do I log into Jotz CMS? You received an email containing your login details back in October, with the subject line "Jotz CMS login details for your account on robosumo.eu". It will have been sent from accounts@robosumo.eu, rather than from my TU Dublin address.
When is the blog deadline? Friday 26-Apr-2024.
I forget how to embed an image / embed a video / insert code / whetever - How do I use Jotz CMS? Have a look at my the Jotz CMS video tutorial above. If you view the video on YouTube, you'll be able to see linked timestamps for specific topics in the video description.
My teammate wrote the code for our robot - should I still include the code on my blog? It's fine to include it, provided that you clearly state who wrote it. Including it without correctly attributing authorship to the person who wrote it would be plagiarism, but as long as you spell out clearly that it's someone else's work then it's no problem to include it. However, it won't earn you a lot of credit. You need to make sure you use your blog to show us what you personally contributed to your team's achievements. If you did anything useful, be sure to show us the evidence on your blog. If it's not shown on your blog, don't expect to receive credit for it.
Should I write about Track TT on my blog? Yes, the work you did for Track TT should be included in your blog. Assuming you successfully completed the Track TT challenge, then your blog should provide evidence of the work you did, what you achieved, and what you learned.
What should I write on the blog about Track TT? I included a list of suggestions in the section "Documenting your Track TT work in a WordPress blog post" on the Track TT information web page.
Does Track TT account for a specific percentage of the blog mark? No. Although we recommend that you write about Track TT, the level of detail about Track TT varies widely from blog to blog. Ultimately, your blog provides an opportunity for you to share everything of value that you learned / achieved during the entire project, so if you did great work on Track TT then it probably deserves more attention in your blog. On the other hand, if things didn't work out well in Track TT and you ended up doing much more interesting work in the sumo phase of the project, then Track TT might occupy less space in your blog. Hence, we do not attach a specific percentage to the Track TT element of the blog. Instead, we assess the blog as a whole and assign a grade that reflects the quality of the content presented.
Should I write about the LED Flash Challenge on my blog? That's up to you. It's fine to included it, if you like, but if you haven't already written anything about it then at this stage your writing time might be better used documenting your work on Track TT and the sumo tournament. The LED Flash Challenge is a great learning experience, but it involves much less creative design work than the later stages of the project, so it doesn't lend itself to very interesting blog content.
I can see the videos on my blog, but nobody else can see them - how come? Assuming you uploaded your videos to YouTube and then embedded them in your blog post, you probably have them set as "private" which means they'll only be visible when you're logged in to your YouTube/Google account. Go into YouTube and check the settings for each video to make sure it's set as "public".