It’s been a while since I looked at weblog, so I’m curious about the current state of some of the workflows:
Uploading: what’s the option and/or procedure to upload files such as custom fonts, and have them be served via the CDN?
GitHub publishing: will images uploaded locally to the repo be processed when the blog gets built, and automatically added and linked via the CDN? Or do they need to be uploaded separately?
In a similar vein to the above, is some.pics supposed to act as the CDN in addition to being its own unique service?
Have there been any further thoughts around integrating some kind of template logic (I had mentioned Mustache in the past) to allow for more customization?
Is minification and compression performed on static files (HTML, CSS, etc)?
Great questions, and thanks for posting this here (I replied to your email days late, ugh, and I’m going to share my reply below for everyone’s benefit).
So, the unfortunate scoop on all of this is that it’s nowhere near as far along as I’d like it to be. Here’s some more detail though:
There is a way to upload custom files, but it’s kind of awkward. If you wanted to upload a custom font, for instance, you could use the “Files” feature (imagine me doing over-the-top air quotes on the word “Files”, lol), which is explained at The Omg Lol Times · Weblog Updates: Files, Tag Listings, and Multiple Post Landing Pages, and use a stylesheet with a base64-encoded version of the font. Obviously this isn’t deal at all, but it does work.
The GitHub publishing process only looks for weblog posts and pretty much ignores everything else… but, if you include images and other files, they’ll still be in your repo. And from there, you can actually use the free rawgit/jsdelivr CDN that sits on top of all GitHub repos. For instance:
So, that would actually be a fairly decent way to work with things like images and font files (or really any type of file), though it has some drawbacks (i.e. weird-looking URLs, and wouldn’t be viable for folks who aren’t using GitHub).
I’ve been suggesting that folks use some.pics as a way to host pictures on their weblogs, but it really only makes sense if you also want to share those pictures in general. So that’s one solution for pictures, but it’s not a great one.
I did start to look into Mustache, and it looks really slick! I still need to figure out how to weave it (seamlessly) into the existing weblog setup, but I think it can be done!
I believe the weblog.lol server is gzipping what it serves (I’ll need to double-check) but there’s no minification on anything yet.
So, that’s an honest accounting of the current state of things. It’s admittedly not great! What we need is a proper content hosting setup—something that omg.lol services can tap into seamlessly. I have every intention of building it, but it’s going to take a bit of effort to do it properly. The good news is that I’ve more or less settled on Bunny (https://bunny.net) for the CDN, which would make it very easy to tap into the amazing file and image optimization tools that they provide.
Here’s some more detail though:
