LittleBITS: Website Changes for Speed and Security

Originally published at: LittleBITS: Website Changes for Speed and Security - TidBITS

We’ve been making some changes to the TidBITS website, and while you shouldn’t notice much difference, there are a few rough edges that you may hit while we’re finishing up.

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Congratulations on all the updates, Adam @ace. Now please take a break!

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I hope so soon! We got a little overzealous with a bot-blocking rule in Cloudflare, which broke some RSS readers and images in Facebook posts. That’s now fixed, I believe, as is the connection between Stripe Connect and Paid Memberships Pro. The only thing left to fix, I think, is our connection to the VaultPress backup service that’s part of Jetpack.

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The very last bits you mentioned, concerning the cross-links between TidBITS and TidBITS Talk, are so welcome. I noticed the “TidBITS Home” link as soon as it appeared in the header.

I did wonder, @ace, what was the thought process that led to the two sites not having easy passage from one to the other over these four years? I know you’ve always approached TidBITS with much intentionality and purpose, so I always presumed it was a design decision rather than an oversight.

My interest stems from curiosity rather than criticism, even as I’m really happy for this development. (Also for the tip on Cloudflare!)

This is merely our latest effort to link the two sites. Previously, the main site had a TidBITS Talk link in the Get TidBITS menu, and the TidBITS Talk site had Articles and Issues links in the nav bar. This discussion was what prompted the latest approach.

I’ve never been all that perturbed about the linkage because article comments are appended to the articles themselves, which is the primary goal. Someone who’s just reading doesn’t even need to know that the Discourse site exists as a separate entity.

Those who do want to contribute get bounced over to Discourse, of course, and once they’re here, they’ll see the general TidBITS Talk discussions as well, and Discourse will ensure they continue to be alerted to new stuff. We mention TidBITS Talk enough in articles that I’ve always assumed people would find it if they wanted, and I have no inherent goal of growing TidBITS Talk—it can grow organically. It goes up and down, but we’re hitting roughly 200,000 pageviews per month on TidBITS Talk alone now.

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Thanks Adam! I’ve gone the “getting bounced over to Discourse” route any number of times, and then found myself staying for other stuff posted here. Getting back to TidBITS always required me to think more than I wanted to. :slight_smile:

I’m not shocked that you’re getting that many page views on the Talk site. At least for me, this site helps satisfy my need for Mac info and troubleshooting tips, plus there’s some great folks here.

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@ace, is it possible recent changes you made to the site also resulted in any brand new posting I make leading to an unread message badge on its parent thread in the latest list? Didn’t use to be that way and I think that was correct. My latest post is not ‘unread’ to me.

No, nothing we did would affect that, which is entirely within Discourse. We’re running the latest 2.9b4, and I don’t see anything about that in the release notes or in the settings. It might be worth waiting until we install b5, whenever that comes out, and see if it’s just a bug in the latest version.

If you mean what you say (the badge is on the thread in the list of threads for a forum), then I don’t see what you’re seeing.

I do get a notice on the forum page that the forum has a new message in some thread (“See 1 new or updated topic”) when the only change is what I just posted, and that has been the case for a long time, but I believe that’s not what you’re reporting.