Re: Web team summary for 2024

Hi Thomas and all

Thanks for the summary!

I continue inline...

El 12/7/25 a las 10:59, Thomas Lange escribió:
> Hi all,
>
> at the beginning of 2025 the press team asked Debian teams for a
> summary of their activities in 2024. It seems that nothing was
> published by the press team, and I forgot to post it in the
> meantime. Here's what I've sent them:
>
>
> What did the web team in 2024 ?
>
> During 2024 the web team continued to clean up the web content. We
> constantly put some effort into checking if the web pages are still up
> to date and relevant for our users.
>
> We overall removed 64200 files in the git repository (including 54300
> security files and 8700 old news pages). The list of security
> announcements now links to the mailing list archive.
>
> - Instead of a detailed listing of former years of Debian partners we
>    now only have a summary of them and focus on the partners that
>    currently support Debian.
>
> - More accurate translation statistics by ignoring more pages that do
>    not need a translation (e.g. old voting infos, consultants and users
>    pages) on https://www.debian.org/devel/website/stats/
>    (in the past we listed 12.000+ pages to be translated, now less than 400 pages).
>
> - Thomas Lange  did a talk in MiniDebConf Berlin about "Past and
>    future changes to the Debian web pages". See
>    https://peertube.debian.social/w/p/qAa36hNaYuk7n3SzKGpKkH or
>    https://meetings-archive.debian.net/pub/debian-meetings/2024/MiniDebConf-Berlin/18-past-changes-and-future-plans-for-the-debian-web-pages.webm

These past months I have not been very active writing mails or 
committing work, but I think I managed to keep myself up to date reading 
mails and this summary and I watched the video talk referenced and 
helped, thanks!

> - Our main download page (/distrib) uses more direct links to the
>    ISOs, instead of pointing only to the torrents folders.
>
> - We now have a nice table showing the recent releases and their
>    support status
>
> - Cleaned up old web pages of releases and only kept a small amount of important information:
>
>    for old releases removed the installation guide and only kept the
>    text version of release notes. Before we had 500+ different versions
>    (including translations, different architectures, multiple formats)
>    of the installation guide for one release and nearly 400 versions of
>    the release notes. Removing those files also helped to get better
>    web search results.
>
> - We now have better search results by ignoring the web page footer
>    (which made searching for a specific year impossible)
I think overall we are in a better situation with the website now, in 
the path of simplifying the codebase, getting better search results and 
reducing the machine power and time invested in building our pages. 
Hopefully this also helps for newcomers to feel the website codebase 
less overwhelming. I know that we lose some info and translations but I 
think the balance is positive taking into account the relatively small 
workforce we have in the team for maintaining al that...
>
> - We generate the list of recent security announcements automatically.
>    Before, for each DSA/DLA someone had to manually prepare two files.
>    For more details see https://blog.fai-project.org/posts/security-webwml-removed/
>
> - Removed outdated vendors of Debian installation media.

 From my side I have to say that I am behind the preinstallvendors@ mail 
alias and I plan to review all the list and update it.

Another thing that has been done in the past months is an audit on the 
/users folder, done by Luis Muñoz (thanks!)

>
> - Removed links to very old news and announcements. We keep the last 3
>    years on the web pages and still have all original news and
>    announcements in the mailing list archives. The web logs showed that
>    there was not much demand from users.
When this was done I was a bit in a doubt about if we should keep all of 
them or maybe more years. But after thinking a bit more, I think it's 
better to keep some years (3 is fine) to keep the website small and 
smart (better search results). The news are always accessible via 
mailing list archives (yes, we lose the old translations, but for 
example many pages from old news include links to external website that 
get broken, and for this and other reasons those old pages need 
maintenance. There are other ways to get the info for the people 
interested in the past: mailing list archives, archive.org, or the git 
codebase. We could decide to make "static" the old stuff and move it to 
a different place (similar way the DebConf people do with the past 
DebConf websites) but again that needs somebody to take ownership of the 
task and do the work (and maintain that other website)...
>
> - An outreachy intership for the web team was accepted and started in
>    December 2024. Divine Attah-Ohiemi will work until March 2025 on the
>    project "Make the Debian main website more attractive by switching
>    to HuGo as site generator" https://dev.to/0xfaker
>    This is a "proof-of-concept" to explore migrating the website from
>    wml to HuGo as a static generator.

During this summer I expect to put much more time in Debian, re-review 
this project and think/play a bit with Hugo . Migrating to a new engine 
would also solve the "migration to HTML5" bug, and some other bugs 
related to layout, CSS etc. I will try to do bug triaging this summer, too.

Kind regards,