Take ✨ Alchemy to the next level about pelican-alchemy

[alanorth]

Try using the new GitHub Projects workflow to track issues and pull requests for this milestone. 👍

[alanorth]

Feedback:

• New site is 230KiB, old site is 178KiB ⚠️
• Old site is including bootstrap.min.js and jquery.min.js and I'm pretty sure we're only using the CSS grid parts of Bootstrap, so we could actually even get rid of ~50KiB more on the old site 🔥
• New site includes ~30KiB of fonts, which we should probably not be using anyway (switch to native font stacks, they are pretty good on all platforms now) ⚠️
• Ideally the four CSS assets would be combined and minified, but I know you want to keep build dependencies simple (maybe we can just pre-generate them and give build instructions like in my Hugo Bootstrap v4 theme) ⚠️
• I love the use of Font Awesome for tag and category icons etc in the new theme 🙌
• The new theme performs much better on the w3c validator (only one minor issue, compared to a dozen on the old theme) ﷺ

Really awesome work, @rwanyoike. I think this can absolutely replace the current theme immediately as is. It already has feature/functional parity with the old theme, provides extra value, and is more standards compliant—we can fix the rest after the switch.

[rwanyoike]

It's taken shape https://rwanyoike.github.io/pelican-alchemy/

[alanorth]

Page no function!

[rwanyoike]

gh-pages must be acting up, if you attach any query, ?pickles3243, it works?

[alanorth]

Ah, it's working now. Looks great, but so does the original pelican-alchemy. It would be good to see them side by side with the same content.

[rwanyoike]

you're right! I got gh-pages to work on my fork, https://rwanyoike.github.io/nairobilug.or.ke/ <-> https://nairobilug.or.ke/.

[alanorth]

Mash'allah. ﷲ. It looks fantastic, dude. I'll do a closer look tomorrow to try and quantify how zesty the improvement is.

One improvement could be to just bite the bullet and switch to Bootstrap v4 though, or at least to steal its native font CSS stuff. I am using it on my Hugo blog theme and it looks great on all modern platforms and is quick to load.

[rwanyoike]

Just for the rem's 🤘

Here's the same with bootstrap v4, ported, with a bunch of 'fixes'. How does it compare: https://rwanyoike.github.io/nairobilug.or.ke2

https://rwanyoike.github.io/nairobilug.or.ke - bootstrap v3
https://nairobilug.or.ke/

[alanorth]

Heh, the Typography on the Bootstrap v4 one looks like crap actually. WTF? The typography on my blog looks much better and it's just plain Bootstrap v4—what's up with the fonts on your new version?

A bonus is that this new version is 30KiB smaller though, and Bootstrap v4 will be more future proof anyways.

[rwanyoike]

Old cache must be acting up in your region, the fonts look like your blog's in chrome. 🤔

…

On Dec 1, 2016 00:53, "Alan Orth" ***@***.***> wrote: Heh, the Typography on the Bootstrap v4 one looks like crap actually. WTF? The typography on my blog looks much better <https://picturingjordan.com/> and it's just plain Bootstrap v4—what's up with the fonts on your new version? A bonus is that this new version is 30KiB smaller though, and Bootstrap v4 will be more future proof anyways. — You are receiving this because you were mentioned. Reply to this email directly, view it on GitHub <#47 (comment)>, or mute the thread <https://github.com/notifications/unsubscribe-auth/ADgdOX1vGwWuggte4hgNa_ZjLKcmEwTLks5rDfBAgaJpZM4KqgmW> .

[alanorth]

Great success, I shift-refreshed and now I see it. Looks great. Ship it!

By the way, for my blog I shaved off 50+ KiB by using a custom Bootstrap that only includes the typography and grid stuff, as well as only including CSS for Font Awesome icons I was using.

I know one of the goals was to keep the dependencies low, but you could pre-generate these in the theme and then only people who know how or need to change them would need npm.

[rwanyoike]

We can definitely can work on theme size and performance using these tips! Ref. #54