I’ve been thinking about making updates to DashGL. And I think the format that I want to use is split the web site between a blog and tutorials.

For the tutorials, I can have each tutorial have its own Github / Gitlab repository. The root of the repository would have a readme file that contains a table of contents for all of the steps and a abstract / description of the project.

Each step in the tutorial would be given by a folder in the repository. Each folder would have it’s own read me that would serve and the article for that step.

I could them complile these into one tutorial that would be referenced from the webpage. And that way when I work on tutorials, I could simply focus on doing the programming and writing the readmes for the repository, which I need to do anyways. And that should avoid having to go back and making the web page as a separate project after the fact.

The tutorials should all be in numbered order for each step, and should follow the order set by the table of contents, or otherwise by the step number defined in the name of the folder.

For the blog, I think I was thinking the easiest approach would be use a tool such as Hackmd.io. And this would allow me to create a blog, where more recent posts come first and then other posts come in reverse chronological order.

And I think that should be a good balance that should allow me to easily update the site. When I specifically want to focus on a tutorial, I can focus on Github and the repository. And when I want to add a quick or simple note, or sort my thoughts out, I can use the blog format to add posts to the site.

What remains is the site itself. And recently I’ve found Bootstrap, and React and are pretty impressed with the way they combine to break a website down into components for simplicity. I’n not sure if I would need to roll-my-own, or if there is a template engine that already exists that could work.

I specifically like the half-height-carousel template, and I think that’s the general style I would go for on the front cover. A concept image at the top, followed by the recent blog posts, followed by a list of tutorial cards. For each tutorial we could use the post template. Not sure if we would need something more complicated for the blog or not.

I think we generally need a list that scrolls until there are no posts, with some indication of what the month and year are, and if there are any tags on the post or not.

For the format, I think the easiest option would be to have a static site generator, that way the site would be indexed from search engines, and anyone would be able to reference the site even without Javascript. I think that if Javascript is enabled, then any page change, we grab the JSON object required to generate the page, and then hangle the history object, so we aren’t using more packets than we need to. But testing for that can wait until we generate the site, and otherwise we should be looking into libraries like Gatspy to see if the functionality we’re looking for has already been packaged.