Jobs Report (ELMR)

Visualization of the monthly jobs report by the BLS

You can find ELMR online as well as help documentation at the following links:

• ELMR Application
• ELMR Read the Docs

Note that pushing to the master branch of this repository will automatically redeploy the app to Heroku. Pushes will also update the documentation on ReadTheDocs.org.

Components

This project consists of the following:

• An ingestion system that fetches data from the Bureau of Labor Statistics
• A simple Flask application that serves data with a RESTful API
• A front end visualization created with D3 and Bootstrap

Getting Started

Here's the quick steps to get the server running so you can start developing on your local machine. Open up a terminal and run the following commands.

1. Clone the repository

    $ git clone [email protected]:bbengfort/jobs-report.git
    $ cd jobs-report
   

2. If you haven't already, it's a good idea to install virtualenv

    $ pip install virtualenv
   

   Note that you might need the sudo command for this.

3. Create your virtualenv

    $ virtualenv venv
   

   This will make a directory called venv in your work directory.

4. Activate the virtual environment

    $ source venv/bin/activate
    (venv)$
   

   You should now see a "venv" in parentheses before your prompt.

5. Install the dependencies into your environment

    (venv)$ pip install -r requirements.txt
   

6. Create a database for the ELMR app (ensure PostgreSQL is installed)

    (venv)$ psql -c "CREATE DATABASE elmr;"
    (venv)$ bin/elmr-admin.py createdb
   

7. Migrate the to the latest version of the database

    (venv)$ bin/elmr-admin.py upgrade
   

8. Run the tests to make sure everything is set to go.

    (venv)$ make test
   

9. Run the ingestion tool to fetch the latest data.

    (venv)$ bin/elmr-admin.py ingest
   

10. Copy the ingested data to the data folder of the app (this step will be deprecated soon).

    (venv)$ cp fixtures/ingest-DATE/elmr.json elmr/static/data/elmr.json
    

11. Run the server

    (venv)$ bin/elmr-admin.py runserver
    

12. Open a browser to http://127.0.0.1:5000/

Dependencies and Development

This section describes some of the tools used in the project, as well as giving some tips and advice for quickly changing elements of the page.

Preloader Animation

The preloader animation that currently says "Loading Visualization ..." was created by Preloaders.net. You can choose an animation, then customize the text, colors, animation speed, and size on their webpage. Download the gif and place it into elmr/static/img/loader.gif to update it if you'd like.

Note: the current color matches the "info" text scheme, if you'd like to use it, the hexadecimal is #31708f.

Javascript Libraries

• moment.js handles the parsing and manipulation of time

• moment-range handles time intervals and is crucial for the slider controller

• D3 generates the interactive graphs and data docs.

• jQuery-UI provides the slider control and maybe the DatePicker. I prefer to not use this library, but in the case of the slider, there isn't really too much choice. Minimize the amount this library is used!

• Underscore (_) and jQuery ($) provide most of the tools and functional calls in the code.

Style Libraries

• FontAwesome is a collection of icons. Most, if not all, of the icons are provided by font-awesome. To add an icon, enter an html tag as follows:

    <i class="fa fa-icon-class"></i>
  

  Where "icon class" is the name of the icon from the list of icons at the link provided. Icons can be colored and sized using CSS font-size and color attributes.

• Bootstrap handles the grid layout and most of the non-javascript components on the page. If you don't know Bootstrap, then you'll have trouble dealing with the HTML.

About

This project was developed as part of a course project at the University of Maryland.

ELMR = Economic Labor Measurement Report

The image used in this README, Census punch card reader by Andrew Shieh, is licensed by CC BY-NC-2.0.