Publishing notes

This site has github pages activated via the gh-pages branch, and a CNAME entry pointing to www.ratnaweera.xyz (note the www.). To publish the website, I need to push the content of the _site/ folder to the gh-pages branch. This is automated with the quarto publish tool using the following command:

quarto publish gh-pages --no-prompt

At my provider, I’ve created four A-Records pointing to 185.199.108.153-185.199.111.153 (see these instructions). This redirects EVERYTHING from ratnanil.github.io to ratnaweera.xyz (including pages of other repos that I’m the owner of). I’ve added an additional CNAME record for the www subdomain (www.ratnaweera.xyz, see here).

To make sure that no domains can be taken over, I’ve verified my domains on github using these instructions.

PS: Unlike before, I completely omit using netlify, since this just creates additional overhead without much gain.

Preview images / Twitter cards

Preview images are used in the blog listing, but also as twitter cards (preview image when tweeting a like to a specific site)

  • Size and Ratio
    • All preview images should have an aspect ratio of 3:2 (width:height).
    • When working with ggplot2, 15cm x 10cm is usually fine
    • Twitter Cards apparently have an optimal size of 1500 x 500px
  • They have a background color of “#073b4c”
  • Text color: #ADB5BD
  • To publish a preview image to gh-pages, you need to add it in resources. You can then reference the full, relative path:
---
image: /apps/geodienste-kantone/preview.png
resources: preview.png
---

Styling:

Add class external to URLS that refer to an external website. E.g: [Zurich University of Applied Sciences (ZHAW)](https://www.zhaw.ch/en/about-us/person/rata/){.external}

Large Files

I’ve had too many repos that have become huge because I thoughlessly committed large files. Using git lfs as a workaround was not very satisfactory either, since it’s not easy to free up the quota of git lsf my simply deleting files from the history (you have to delete the whole repo intead!). I’m still looking into this, I think good practice for now would be to simply put all large files in subdirectories containing a .gitingore file containing a *.