Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2021-11)

GSC is claiming 'no data' for CWVs again, but I still otherwise seem to be OK.

The first page with database-sourced Product information/review went in today.

The database-sourced Event system now supports Review and ratings (eg out of 5).

Google seems to keep changing its mind about how it wants to see structured data for Event, Product, Review and similar. And some of the structure is complex and ambiguous. Manually updating the tens of such items in EOU over and over is hard.

To this end I created a new script script/productHTML.sh to convert simple property text files (loosely based on those used for the LEDs page) into HTML to insert into appropriate pages. More than one per page is allowed.

This schema allows consistent compact HTML5 to be generated. All relevant pages can be updated when the script or source properties are, even exposing the dependencies automatically to make. Unique IDs can be generated to allow these items to be referred to.

The first item transferred to the new system is in the Wants and Offers page. It is a (repeating) Event for Kingston Green Drinks on the last Tuesday of every month, thus non-trivial. It does not have an embedded Review.

Pushed out V1.1.8 of reutils that computes live GB grid intensity and tweets it. The main change is to put the computed grid intensity (gCO2/kWh) in each tweet, at the start for easy human parsing. The static image was also removed from the tweet since it was causing confusion.

Typical text now:

290gCO2/kWh National Grid CO2 intensity is average so don't run big appliances now if you can wait. http://bit.ly/3usoe #CO2 |1321

Though other work was already underway on reutils (eg to allow year-based fuel intensities and a clean switch between them), this set of changes was provoked by a tweet received before I was even out of bed on Sunday morning!