Web team summary for 2024
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
- 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)
- 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- Removed outdated vendors of Debian installation media.
- 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.
- 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.
--
regards Thomas
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