Project Bluebell: time for a site redesign!

[alexwlchan]

This is a big ticket to cover a moderate redesign of the site and its content. Overall goals:

• Incorporate TILs as a top-level idea
• Simplify the number of pages I need to maintain and manage (/projects/ is very out-of-date!)
• Simplify some of the codebase and build process
• Make the build faster to run locally

I'll put details in individual PRs linked to this issue.

• Fix the page width bug
• Rip out the "subscribe" component
• Fix the CSS cache-busting
• Add the TILs and their RSS feed
• Swap out the primary font
• Tweak the link styles
• Change the top nav
• Create an articles collection
• Bin the projects page
• Move across all the old TILs
• Get rid of per-year indexes
• Add a "fun stuff" page
• Fold in "inclusive events"
• Every page should be in a nav section
• Run in macOS Ruby (Allow running in macOS Ruby rather than Docker #760)
• Go back to _posts, actually (Use the posts collection, not articles #765)
• Bump the Nokogiri version (Bump to the newest version of Nokogiri #769)

[alexwlchan]

For at least some of these changes, I want to make sure I'm not changing the output of the site. I've written a short Python script that compares two copies of the site and checks they're byte-for-byte identical:

import pathlib
import filecmp

import tqdm


def get_file_paths_under(root=".", *, suffix=""):
    """
    Generates the absolute paths to every matching file under ``root``.
    """
    root = pathlib.Path(root)

    if root.exists() and not root.is_dir():
        raise ValueError(f"Cannot find files under file: {root!r}")

    if not root.is_dir():
        raise FileNotFoundError(root)

    for dirpath, _, filenames in root.walk():
        for f in filenames:
            p = dirpath / f

            if p.is_file() and f.lower().endswith(suffix):
                yield p


for p in tqdm.tqdm(list(get_file_paths_under("_site.amber"))):
    new_p = pathlib.Path(str(p).replace("_site.amber", "_site"))

    if not new_p.exists():
        print(p)
        continue

    if not filecmp.cmp(p, new_p, shallow=False):
        print(p)

for p in tqdm.tqdm(list(get_file_paths_under("_site"))):
    old_p = pathlib.Path(str(p).replace("_site", "_site.amber"))

    if not old_p.exists():
        print(p)
        continue

[alexwlchan]

One thing I've discovered: the built-in smartify filter is pretty slow! I can make the site a lot faster by using that more judiciously (and maybe caching the output later?).

[alexwlchan]

I'm starting to simplify my CSS setup (see more notes in #743).

As a brief benchmark, the size of my current style.css file is 16,888 bytes.