Extra tasks

Some extra Rake tasks are provided to make life a little easier.

Pinging external services

When publishing your site, you want it to get picked up quickly by search engines and other spiders. You can send a ping to Google, for example, to tell it your site was updated. I'm not sure how much it helps, but every little bit counts.

You can ping Google about your updated sitemap.xml file:

rake ping:sitemap

You can send a ping to ping-o-matic to automatically notify a whole range of services at once:

rake ping:pingomatic

These tasks use the settings from your config.yaml file for your site title and URL.

Automatic pinging

The above two tasks are combined into a single ping task, which is automatically run after calling deploy:rsync — except when the deployment target is 'staging'.

Finding unused CSS with Deadweight

Sometimes it is nice to get an overview of all the CSS that is not used on your site. Deadweight is a Ruby gem that can help you with that. You give a list of pages and a list of CSS files and it tells you which of your selectors matched no elements in any of your pages.

You can simply run it using:

rake deadweight

That will scan your ./output directory for HTML and CSS files and output the results. Note that this is not a perfect solution, as it cannot take into account any changes to the DOM made by your javascripts, but it will still be a good manual check.