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studio status report: 2020-07

month 7 of 2020 has been about building the lunr experience into the rasx() context

The lunr index UX is now a fact of life in the Songhay Studio. The Blog-entry index for the rasx() context is so large that a 1000-entry partition threshold was added in Songhay.Publications. My comment from June should be revised a bit:

  • lunr indices will be partitioned by entry count
  • the Shadow-DOM, document-centric lunr experience uses the latest partition only
  • the SPA-based experience should load/unload multiple indices, paging through by time and supporting break-out by category/tag

This SPA-based (Angular) experience, the ‘side-car app’ listed below, was pushed down a bit in the development schedule sketch. I expect that adding category/tag support to the entry index—and updating the ‘side-car app’—will not be trivial. A task has been added to start addressing this issue.

confronting the Stills API

My little development schedule is now prioritizing the Stills API. The lunr stuff is big but the still API is huge. Without a backend supporting responsive images in a data-driven way, I will continue to refuse to use images for Web design in this Studio. This refusal prevents me from building a portfolio. Not having a portfolio prevents me from courting entire work-for-hire markets.

Success here could be so effective that the need for Flickr or a Google Photos (which I do not use) will be profoundly optional. It could also be so ineffective that it is only a small stepping stone toward yet another larger goal (like how to incorporate third-party CDNs into the Studio). Cloudflare? Just Azure?

What is quite clear is that the Stills API has been needed for quite some time. This little block of HTML that is over five-years old tells the tale:

    <div class="col-xs-3">
        <a class="hidden-sm hidden-xs" href="#/index">
            <img alt="the kinté space logo" class="IndexLogo" src="images/klogo160.png" width="160" height="160" />
        </a>
        <a class="visible-sm visible-xs" href="#/index">
            <img alt="the kinté space logo" class="IndexLogo" src="images/klogo160.png" width="64" height="64" />
        </a>
    </div>

I assume a Stills API (with srcset and sizes) would eliminate the redundant img declarations above. Eleventy could call the Stills at render time.

another big step: bringing webpack to kintespace.com

One great side effect of bringing lunr to the kintespace.com repo was the introduction of webpack. Before this introduction, I assumed that multiple webpack config files would be needed for every bundling solution needed for kintespace.com. As of now, there are two bundles needed: one for the main site and one for the rasx() context. I see now that one webpack.config.js file can support both (and more) of these bundles by moving from this:

module.exports = { … };

to this:

module.exports = [
    {...sharedConfig,...indexConfig},
    {...sharedConfig,...rasxlogConfig},
];

In other words, webpack supports an array of configurations as well as just one configuration [📖docs]. This is great news!

sketching out a development schedule (revision 10)

The schedule of the month:

  • add Stills API to Songhay.Player (b-roll player) 🕸🌩
  • consider upgrading to .NET 3.0
  • use @songhay/index as a side-car app for “Day Path” and “the rasx() context” 🚛📦
  • add proposed content Web component
  • use the learnings from existing npm packages to build @songhay/player-audio-??? 📦✨
  • modernize the kinté hits page into a progressive web app 💄✨
  • convert Day Path Blog and SonghaySystem.com to HTTPs by default 🔐
  • use the learnings of previous work to upgrade and re-release the kinté space 🚀

https://github.com/BryanWilhite/