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lnug / website

The London Node User Group Website
MIT License
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Rewrite using GatsbyJS #156

Closed sielay closed 5 years ago

sielay commented 5 years ago

I would like to contribute more and thought about refreshing page using GatsbyJS. Any thoughts? @simonmcmanus @admataz

simonmcmanus commented 5 years ago

Hi Sielay,

We would love your contributions, any particular reason to want rewrite is Gatsby?

Any reason you cannot contribute with what we already have?

What kind of refresh were you thinking about?

sielay commented 5 years ago

Hi. I made contributions last time and I appreciate the effort put into the website. Anyhow there are few downsides and few things that make this website be left behind. With Gatsby landscape of static websites has changed rapidly. Mostly thanks to it being PWA such sites are faster, more dynamic and work offline! We can't do it easily from scratch (we always can, but would be effort for effort).

On the other hand, LNUG community is more and more interested in GraphQL and Gatsby is a great playground for it. Building sources providing event data from GitHub issues is a perfect example of writing GraphQL data source.

Except refreshing technically and speeding up I don't see any specific things we should change on the website to not overload it.

simonmcmanus commented 5 years ago

The current site is already a static site with client side routing/rendering, it also works offline, falling back to application cache if service workers are not supported.

There are more details in my talk here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IDAlnMF7HtE

What things are missing that make the current site left behind? Im not sure I follow.

If there are specific perf concerns they should be easy enough to address with what we have.

We did look at the react static site generators when we built the site and they all seemed like overkill for simple static site. One of the things I like about the current approach is that just uses the underlying tech (html and css) rather than jumping on the latest tech trends.

I'm not dead against a rewrite, but would want to do it on the basis of improved user experience and tech longevity rather than a technical refresh.

sielay commented 5 years ago

Ok. I wasn't aware (must miss that) page uses service workes. Then it's not as left behind as I thought. I have a slightly different opinion on overkill, but an opinion it's not a valid argument.

I'll close the issue and wait for ideas on specific things you guys would like to be improved then.