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commit 3aff6b0496e2386b365d2d7dc99023f0a7961654
Author: Tomaz Muraus <to...@tomaz.me>
AuthorDate: Wed Mar 30 23:26:44 2022 +0200
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+---
+layout: post
+title: Website Updates
+author: Tomaz Muraus
+tags:
+ - news
+ - infrastructure
+ - website
+ - git
+---
+
+Today we are happy to announce various website updates. Here is a short
+summary of those updates.
+
+* Move from svn to git for storing the website source code and the
+ generated static content ([https://github.com/apache/libcloud-site][1])
+* New Docker image to make it easier to build and contribute to the website
+* Upgrades to the various software and libraries used to build and serve
+ the website (Jekyll, Ruby, Ruby Gems, jQuery, Bootstrap, etc.).
+* Dark mode / theme for the website
+* Removal of Google tracking code (Google Analytics, Google Fonts)
+* Removal of various Ruby gems which are not needed to build the website
+* Other minor styling improvements
+
+<div class="imginline">
+ <img src="/images/posts/tbd/dark_theme.png" class="img-responsive inline" />
+ <p class="img-caption">Website using dark mode.</p>
+</div>
+
+More on that below.
+
+## Background, Context
+
+It has been over 8 years since the new static [Jekyll powered website has
+been launched][2].
+
+8 years is a long time and since then a lot has changed. Especially in the web
+world, but the website stayed more or less the same.
+
+Since the website is purely static and doesn't contain any dynamic server side
+components this means that not updating the software which is used to build the
+website has no negative security implications for the end users (that's a nice
+thing about all the static website generators). This is vastly different if you
+run a server side CMS such as Wordpress or similar where you need to make sure
+it's always up to date with the latest security patches.
+
+Main problem with using old software (Ruby, Jekyll) was that it was very hard
+to reproduce local development environment which made it almost impossible for
+others to contribute - even I had issues with reproducing the environment in
+the past year.
+
+We used Ruby 1.9 and Jekyll 1.5 which were both almost 8 years old and
+officially deprecated and non-supported for many years already.
+
+At first, I only wanted to create a Docker image with this old software which
+would make it easier for other people to contribute and build the website
+locally.
+
+It turned out that even that is very hard now because of the various old
+versions of the software and libraries that software depends on. After
+many hours, I did [get it to work][3], but I decide to try to go a step
+further and see if I can actually update Ruby and Jekyll.
+
+And surely, it turned out that's not an easy task either. Over the years,
+Jekyll had many releases with breaking changes and to make things worse, we
+also utilize some custom Jekyll plugins which needed to be updated (I was
+actually already somewhat aware I'm opening a can of worms because I
+already tried to do that a couple of times in the past, but each time I
+decided to abandon those efforts since it required too much work / time).
+
+In the end, after addressing all of those various issues and breaking changes,
+I got everything to work.
+
+To make contributing even easier and faster, we also provide a pre-built Docker
+image with the development environment which should save some time and CPU
+cycles since the image doesn't need to be built locally (sadly the image is on
+the larger side because a lot of tooling is needed to build the website - I do
+hope to reduce that a bit in a future when I get a chance by using a multi
+stage build).
+
+Since I was already working on the website I also decided to make a bunch of
+other changes, my favorite one being dark mode / theme. I personally already
+use [Dark Reader extension for Firefox][4] which automatically provides dark
+mode for most websites on the fly, but I know now everyone is using something
+like that and a native dark mode / theme is usually better.
+
+The source code and everything else for the new website is available at
+[https://github.com/apache/libcloud-site][1].
+
+## Conclusion
+
+We hope you will enjoy those new changes and most importantly, we hope
+those changes will decrease the barrier to entry and make contributing to
+the website easier and faster.
+
+[1]: https://github.com/apache/libcloud-site
+[2]:
https://libcloud.apache.org/blog/2014/01/23/welcome-to-the-new-website.html
+[3]:
https://libcloud.apache.org/blog/2014/01/23/welcome-to-the-new-website.html
+[4]: https://addons.mozilla.org/sl/firefox/addon/darkreader/
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