Clean up legacy post content

[mattstein]

Clean up post history for overall consistency.

• consider replacing impersonal “DDEV” author with Randy if he was the actual author, or having authorless posts if we must
• recategorize posts:
  • Announcements (releases, organization news, etc.)
  • Community (events, third-party developments, etc.)
  • DevOps (workflows, infrastructure, etc.)
  • Performance (benchmarking, tips, etc.)
  • Guides (how-to style posts)
• remove obsolete newsletter CTAs
• add fallback thumbnail images
• support real Markdown citations
• re-add videos that were stripped out of Markdown conversion
• audit language and formatting per writing style guide
• replace any frightening imagery, and either add defaults as backup or include hero images for older posts
• remove any older posts that don’t have lasting value (moved to Prune blog posts #37)

[mattstein]

Removed old blog post newsletter CTAs with minimal impact on surrounding copy in 2cb2d6b.

In the future, we could have a footer that’s common to all blog posts for things like newsletter signups or any pertinent, rotating promotional info.

[rfay]

Amazing. You're doing amazing things. My normal caveat... don't get lost in there :)

[mattstein]

😄 I’ll get lost so readers don’t have to!

[mattstein]

Current categories in use:

• CI/CD
• Community
• DDEV
• DevOps
• Uncategorized
• Workflow

Most posts are in “DDEV”, which is redundant at this point. Very few otherwise live in each remaining category so things are pretty lopsided. “Uncategorized” isn’t useful for anyone outside of maybe a pre-publishing workflow.

I’d propose the following categories instead, and reorganizing to balance things out:

• Announcements (releases, organization news, etc.)
• Community (events, third-party developments, etc.)
• DevOps (workflows, infrastructure, etc.)
• Performance (benchmarking, tips, etc.)
• Guides (how-to style posts)

[rfay]

OK with me.

[mattstein]

Recategorized posts and started cleanup in 0ff61be.

Added textlint and went through another big round of cleanup in 40f12c4.

Set up a frontmatter layout for post feature images that includes alt text, captions, and credits and started using it in f8841fe—made it through all posts in 9ba1bbf. (This post is a good example, source here.)

[rfay]

Looking good!

[mattstein]

Made great progress on image handling today, with (optimized, consistently-named) images now part of the repository and loaded on-page more responsibly. Also re-added videos that got wiped out in the Markdown conversion, and added a Videos category as a result—felt right since there’s good content in these and a lot of people like learning that way: https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/category/videos

[mattstein]

Since the post structure is a little different and the categories are not obvious, I’m keeping the readme up to date with future publishing guidance: https://github.com/drud/ddev.com-front-end#adding-new-content

[mattstein]

Improvements around blog imagery:

• Posts without images have a generic fallback thumbnail for their cards.
• Updated the feature images for this post and this post, both of which were too tall and either creepy or underwhelming. Tried to keep it playful and semi-professional.
• I refactored the project to use Astro’s new Content Collections, which are really nice! Currently blog feature images don’t require alt text, but that’s something I can require going forward once I add it to existing posts. (The frontmatter gets validated, which is a lovely thing!)
• Feature image frontmatter can include an optional shadow: true and hide: true, where a drop shadow can prevent some images from visually floating like this one, and in more rare cases the feature image can be hidden when it’s redundant as seen in several video posts like this.

If anybody wants to write descriptive alt text for feature images and/or within post content, that’d be a big help toward something more accessible! I’ll plan on coming back to this soon, though.

[mattstein]

@rfay Can we abolish “DDEV” as a blog post author until the product itself becomes sentient? The blog is written by people, so we might as well consistently identify who’s writing.

There are only five of these posts, and all but one start with a bio that could easily move to an author page:

• 2x Benni Mack
  • https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/why-your-local-dev-environment-should-match-production
  • https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/why-developing-locally-matters
• 1x Sergey Fayngold
  • https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/ddev-local-for-laravel-teams
• 1x Dennis Ameling
  • https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/ddev-wsl2-getting-started
• 1x ?? ← 🤷‍♂️👻
  • https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/reduce-time-onboard-new-developers-ddev

[rfay]

Yes, absolutely.

[mattstein]

Thanks! Do you happen to know who wrote this one?

[rfay]

Is the 2018 version still there? We could drop this one and I'd be fine with it. But I'd bet it was written by Elli Ludwigson, eludwigson.

[mattstein]

Is the 2018 version still there?

I’m not sure how to answer that, but these are Elli’s other posts: https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/author/elli-ludwigson

2018 was a busy year for posts, many of which extoll the virtues of onboarding time with DDEV. 2018’s posts span these pages:

https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/9
https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/10
https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/11
https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/12
https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/13
https://ddev.m7n.io/blog/14

Please let me know if I should drop the post or attribute it to Elli Ludwigson.

[rfay]

Just drop it, thanks.

[rfay]

I don't think we need to keep anything for historical reasons; the reason for this content to exist is mostly where it is a more narrative presentation, as opposed to the docs, where things need to be largely prescriptive.

The more things that are duplicates of the docs, the more things have to be maintained in multiple places.

[mattstein]

I don't think we need to keep anything for historical reasons;

I should have asked before migrating and recategorizing and editing everything. 😢

Are you saying we should delete most of these posts? If not, which ones specifically?

[rfay]

I was definitely worried about that and tried to hint. There are so many (not by me) that were just developed for "SEO" or whatever, and don't have any real value unless it's for that, which I don't much care about. Please open an issue that will point to a list of content and I can make decisions about deletion.

[mattstein]

Created an issue and assigned you, @rfay: https://github.com/orgs/ddev/projects/3?pane=issue&itemId=20593590

[mattstein]

Decided against going back and re-editing posts to use the same language conventions as the docs. Everything’s pretty well cleaned up and recategorized so I’m going to call this finished. If anyone wants to further scrutinize content or formatting, they can have at it!

[rfay]

Congrats and thanks. I think you made right decision. Taking on infinite editing to fix the past is too much work for little reward.