Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2022-10)

... And we are back on sensible time this morning! Greenwich just up the road is back on Greenwich Mean Time.

Checking the logs for this current week suggests that at least three visitors (two from the UK, one from IE, with one UK and the IE on mobile ISPs) had Save-Data enabled. None the previous full week though!

The home page now has the WebSite type mixed in alongside Article to explicitly communicate alternate site names with alternateName to search engines such as Google. (See Google's help on site names.)

As of this afternoon I have cleared the last of the spelling warnings from the main HTML pages. Strong coffee helped plough through the last 30 or so!

The majority of pages have required some sort of SPELLEX exception list, but not all.

% egrep -l SPELLEX .*.html | wc -l
283
% egrep -L SPELLEX .*.html | wc -l
91

I have modified EOU page generation logic so that the HTML title of the home page is of the form Earth Notes: Rest of H1 Title rather than Rest of H1 Title - Earth Notes as was/is for everything else. This because it makes more sense for a home page to be site-first, both from a reading point of view and probably SEO.

Plodding progress! For main (top-level, hand-created) HTML pages:

• 70-something warnings still to clear up.
• 220 main pages now have a SPELLEX spelling exceptions entry (153 do not).

% ls .build/*.warn | wc -l
74
% egrep -l SPELLEX .*.html | wc -l
220
% egrep -L SPELLEX .*.html | wc -l
153

I have a new toy. I was ruminating yet again on how best to generate and display graphs and diagrams, often as figures. I was struck once more that gnuplot is capable of generating SVG (Scalable Vector Graphics) which should present nicely for both desktop and lite/mobile views without the ugly rescaling/rerastering that PNGs imply.

EOU image support code understands to use SVG images as-is, and will not attempt to rescale.

Such SVGs should look nicer and be more readable for 'lite' views.

SVG output from gnuplot, 'minified' with svgo, looks to be fairly byte-efficient at only ~2kB on the wire (gzipped), for this:

See all artefacts and workflow.