Greetings unto their Highnesses Insulae Draconis, their Seneschal, the Kingdom Webminister and various others who may be interested, from Sela de la Rosa, Insulae Draconis Webminister. Here is my report for the third quarter of 2019.

• Traffic and Search Engine Coverage
• Work Done This Quarter
• State of the Shires
• Upcoming Work

Traffic and Search Engine Coverage

Traffic this quarter is overall roughly level with last quarter, though it has been busier in the lead up to Raglan, and quieter thereafter.

Figure 1: Users of insulaedraconis.org each week (blue), compared with prev quarter (orange)

One thing I would like to highlight this month is our search engine coverage. Google lists 158 pages from our site, which is pretty much the whole thing.

Figure 2: Google coverage of insulaedraconis.org

But what about the over a thousand pages listed as excluded? It turns out that this is quite correct: the vast majority of these are old pages that have been removed (398), the same page listed with or without WWW in the domain name or similar (324), or pages that redirect to another, such as http to https (225).

However, that second category has quite a mix - we have pages listed with WWW, others listed without, and others on old domains that were used for testing. Rather than leaving this to Google to guess, this is something we can and should control ourselves. More on this below.

Work Done This Quarter

These are the items that were reported by shire webministers in their Q2 reports, which I’ve tried to address:

HTTPS on Eplaheimr. In a happy coincidence, GitLab Pages (Eplaheimr’s web host) recently started providing support for HTTPS for free. This has now been enabled.

Kingdom iCal feed. Not strictly an Insuale Draconis matter, but this allows shire webministers to automatically embed the Kingdom calendar (or a subset thereof) in their websites. This has been done and published.

Central handling of domain names. As mentioned in my last report, certain individuals are paying annually for many of the domain names we used, and we’re heavily reliant on those individuals’ continued good will and participation. I’ve raised this with the seneschal and exchequer to see if there might be room to perform this centrally.

Finding a new platform. I’m working on “Templateshire” which will provide an additional option for group and barony webministers who wish to use a solution along the lines of the Drachenwald website.

State of the Shires

The webminister of Glen Rathlin and Lough Devnaree has left the shire, and seeks someone to take over running those sites. The Thamesreach webminister also seeks a successor.

Mynydd Gwyn’s webminister wishes to renew the site and hopes to use a Gitlab template to do so.

Pontalarch’s site is already in Gitlab, and the webminister is getting to grips with it, and Eplaheimr’s webminister reports that things have been straightforward so far.

Upcoming Work

I expect my primary focus for this quarter to be “Templateshire”. Now that I have a couple of years’ experience with Jekyll (Dun in Mara was the first Jekyll site I built, and Drachenwald the most recent), I intend to take the bare structure that we use for the Drachenwald site and allow individual shires and baronies to populate it with their own content, images and colours.

This, like everything the web artificers do, will be an option; if a webminister is happy with their own solution, there’s no need for us to intervene.

I expect that the first website to use Templateshire will be Insulae Draconis itself. The technical setup gives us useful tools to take control of our URLs and help solve the problems identified above. The content should largely remain the same - the current content represents a truly enormous amount of work and I have neither the capability nor the capacity to replace it - but the layouts are likely to change.

With this, I then intend to open source the site in the same way as Drachenwald, so that anyone with the interest and a small amount of expertise can make suggested edits through GitLab.

I hope to have a test of the site ready for viewing by the end of 2019, with the intent of launching it on or before your Highnesses’ Coronet in February 2020.

In service, always,
Sela