In case Chris gets hit by a bus

There’s now a an online slack community for UK Gov Camp, available at the link below in huge letters:

That’s nice! How get people into it?

There are a few ways people can join:

Via slack.gov.camp

Point your web browser at http://slack.gov.camp and enter the email address you want to asign up with.
You’ll be send an invite email.
Click the link, to accept the invite, then say hello to the other govcampers.

Click on an embedded govcamp badge

There’s a handy embeddable badge as well, that gives a sign up experience a little like the animated GIF below.

Slack in Sign up badge UX

You can add this to any page that you can add raw HTML to (so you might not be able to embed it in a wordpress post or page straight away).

You do this by pasting in the snippet below:

<script async defer src="https://slack.gov.camp/slackin.js"></script>

Where is this running if we need to fix it?

The slack-in app that provides the features above is currently running on Heroku, in the Europe Region, on their free tier. As such, it might be slow, or occasionally unavailable, as the app has to sleep 6 hours of every 24hr.

The non-CNAMED’s url for the slack-in app is below

https://ukgovcamp-slackin.herokuapp.com

That’s clearly not as snappy as http://slack.gov.camp, so we have a CNAME setup as per heroku’s instructions for setting up custom domains, to make it respond on the shorter address.

Making changes

The source for slackin is on github, and beyond the domain CNAME set up above, the only real config change is the slack API token added by @mrchrisadams, to hook slackin up to the ukgovcamp slack.

It’s a pretty standard heroku deployment, otherwise and is running on the free tier.

It was set up by Chris Adams on Nov 1st 2015, and right now, he’s the best person to contact with queries about how it was was setup. For any UK Govcamp related queries, your best bets are: Zuz or James Cattell