Revise visibility on inspiration index and featured articles in header

[Ardnived]

• [x] Add category toggle, to determine whether its articles are shown on the Inspiration index
• [x] Add category toggle, to determine whether its articles can be featured in the header
• [x] New articles are promoted to the top of Inspiration for the first 2 weeks after being published, other articles appear in a random order. (Give the illusion of fresh content, and help discover new content, since our content is not time sensitive)
• [x] Add "Further Reading" link to the header, which links to a new "Learning" category which will be hidden from the Inspiration index. This will be used for in-depth SEO articles.
• [x] Change "About Meditation" to feature two articles from the "featured in header" categories. The first should be the most recent article, the second can be a random one.

Questions about the events category What about the "Events" category? Those articles are timely and should possibly be unpublished or demoted after a certain amount of time. Is this category relevant enough for continued usage? Should we be soliciting yogis to promote their events via We Meditate more frequently? Can we get someone to take on the responsibility of working with yogis to set up event pages. We've had plenty of requests to promote events on We Meditate, but haven't had the bandwidth to really follow up with them.

[Ardnived]

For now the event category will be removed, in the future we could have a person dedicated to event promotion and liasing.

[Ardnived]

This is now done and in master. Needs to be tested and released. Waiting for Heroku to resolve their GitHub connection.

[Ardnived]

@dbackeus Are you familiar with creating Postgres queries in Rails? I'm trying to create a custom order which will put recently published articles (in the last 2 weeks) at the beginning of the list, and then randomise the order of the rest of the article. This is what I have at the moment, but it just randomises everything. scope :index_order, -> { order("CASE WHEN article_translations.published_at >= CURRENT_TIMESTAMP - INTERVAL '14 days' THEN article_translations.published_at ELSE '#{100.years.ago}' END, RANDOM()") }

If I invert the >= to a <, then everything appears in the published order. So clearly the check works to some extent (ie. when everything is ordered by 100.years.ago then randomisation kicks in). But it doesn't seem to actually pick up recent articles and put them in the right category.

Do you have any thoughts or advice?

[dbackeus]

I've never used RANDOM ordering. It's generally a performance issues since it requires Postgres to load an entire table into memory and then randomize. For small tables it'll be fast enough but won't scale to large tables. Presumably Wemeditate data will remain small enough for this not to become a problem though.

I'd probably make two queries for this. First (pseudo code) recent_articles = Article.where(published_at: 2.weeks.ago..).order(published_at: :desc).limit(MAX_ARTICLES) then random_articles = Article.where.not(id: recent_articles.map(&:id)).order("RANDOM()")).limit(MAX_ARTICLES - recent_articles.length).

This could be done as a single request to Postgres by using sub-queries as well but I don't think that would be helpful in the context of a Rails application.

One thing to keep in mind with regards to randomization is that if we go ahead and implement HTML caching the random order would remain the same for any given page while cached, which should be fine, but just something to keep in mind.

[Ardnived]

You're right, it was a simple solution with 2 queries.

The caching is fine. Already with rails caching the randomisation gets cached for a minute or two. As long as occasionally when people visit they see something different, it will help to give the illusion of freshness a bit.