Alvatal moved from GitHub to GitLab¶
Thursday, May 30, 2024
The alvatal.ee website is now hosted on GitLab.
Alvatal, short for “Estonian Free and Open-Source Software Association” is a non-profit umbrella organization for Estonian open-source and free software initiatives.
Alvatal is led by Edmund Laugasson who dedicated many years of his life as full-time activist helping deciders to opt for FOSS and companies to offer professional services.
The website is made using Jekyll. Lauri Võsandi created it in December 2014 and maintained it until September 2016 (initial commit).
Website: https://www.alvatal.ee
Project page on GitLab: https://gitlab.com/alvatal/www
At least one problem is still open: the present blog post does not appear in the news section even though I added my blog to the planet_en.yml file and GitLab reports “Parsing https://luc.lino-framework.org/rss.xml”. But planet then ignores all blog posts, even this one, which starts with “Alvatal” (the keyword defined in whitelisted_tags).
I converted my Sphinx newsfeed generator (sphinxfeed) to generate ATOM instead of RSS (a task for which I had to read the docs and the code of feedgen), but that too didn’t fix the issue.
Right now i do not know any further…
2024-06-01¶
I guess that RSS or ATOM has some concept of tags, and sphinxfeed doesn’t create
such tags. I now checked the xml files of the two blog entries that get
selected, and indeed the atom.xml file of one of the selected blog posts has a
following <category> element:
<feed xmlns='http://www.w3.org/2005/Atom' ...>
...
<entry>
<category scheme="http://www.blogger.com/atom/ns#" term="alvatal"/>
<title type='text'>alvatal.ee lehel hakkas tööle HTTPS-protokoll</title>
So I extended sphinxfeed to look for
two new fields category and tags in the metadata of the page. If it
does, sphinxfeed now uses the feedgen.FeedEntry.category()
method to add <category> elements to the feed item.
The difference between category and tags is that the category of a
blog post may contain spaces while the tags metadata field is itself a
space-separated list of tags, so each tag must be a single word. Both the
category and each tag will become a <category> element in the feed.
One feed entry can have multiple <category> elements (according to the ATOM
specification),
but Sphinx metadata is designed to have a field at most once per page.
The rss.xml file of my blog now declares three “categories” for this entry:
<entry>
<id>https://luc.lino-framework.org/blog/2024/0530.html</id>
<title>Alvatal moved from GitHub to GitLab</title>
<updated>2024-06-01T07:05:14.936148+00:00</updated>
<content>...</content>
<link href="https://luc.lino-framework.org/blog/2024/0530.html"/>
<category term="alvatal"/>
<category term="estonia"/>
<category term="foss"/>
<published>2024-05-30T23:59:00+00:00</published>
</entry>
And yes! After restarting the pipeline on GitLab, here finally Alvatal also lists my blog entry: https://alvatal.ee/blogs_en/2024/05/30/alvatal-moved-from-github-to-gitlab/
What’s the difference between a “category” and a “tag”? WordPress as a leading free blogging software can be considered an authority for answering this question:
“WordPress lets you put a post into multiple categories. (…) It’s possible that having your post in multiple categories could cause some SEO issues due to duplicate content. If you do use multiple categories, then try to avoid putting one post into two or more main (parent) categories. Each post should fit within one main category.”
“WordPress itself doesn’t have any limit on the number of tags you can have on each post. ()…) We suggest that you normally stick to a maximum of 10 tags per post.”
(Excerpt from Categories vs Tags – SEO Best Practices for Sorting Your Content.
