Project context and instructions

Project context and instructions

This is ancient repo. It has many generations and variations of the website https://donkeyontheedge.com

Over time the site has moved from a roll-your-own blog CMS to Moveable Type and finally to Jekyll on GH-Pages. As a result, the interaction between generations of template revisions and data has made the site very difficult to safely maintain.

Here are the primary objectives of any refactor:

  • Maintain all pages and posts. No refactor action should make any content unavailable.

  • Reduce the size of the repo. It stands at over 2G so we need to take action to split the repo into elements that are actively used for the production and hosting of the website, and legacy content and assets that should be migrated to a backup disk and taken off Github.

  • As the template structure or CSS is refactored and / or modernised, the look and feel of the site will not change.

  • As part of modernising / refactoring rendering bugs should be addressed (chicken and egg on this one so please recommend options). There are alignment issues on mobile and some things don’t fit the viewport on some situations. The pagination system does not work well and the design breaks under certain circumstances

  • Another possible task to add to the list. There are many broken image links. There were caused by the move from Moveable Type to subsequent CMS platforms. The MT image paths had an unusual format with strings like “/assets_c/” and things like that. Most, if not all, the image assets have been stored in the repo. Most are probably in “i” and its subdirectories but not all. If it were possible to find and fix those broken links that would be an improvement.

Please take time to digest the repo and then come back with suggestions for a safe, step by step, refactoring process.

Template issue details to investigate

  • Category headings and listings see: in our story include the string “in” in the name of the category. This is because at the time I couldn’t work out how to display “in” + $CatVarName - please look at renaming the categories and fixing the template so this works sensibly.

Coding and behaviour rules

  • The user will make all commits to Github via Github desktop
  • Avoid using software of tools that originate from Mark Zuckerberg
  • Do not use Tailwind in the refactor