Topic Page Improvements

[haegwan]

Two issues (one is more of a question) found during translating newsletter 73

• Topic page update : the NL 73 includes links to Topic page such as "Trampoline payments" and "Multipath payments" but on "Optech newsletter and website mentions" section of these pages, the newsletter 73 is not mentioned. Not quite familiar with Jekyll's functionality but it'd be better to check if the Topic page can dynamically pull all the mentions to it or if not, making sure to update the topic page on every NL release. FYI reading the topic page source code it looks like pretty manual. If it's a known issue then I can make a PR to add NL73 to these pages.

• Topic page translation : Do we have a plan to translate the Topic pages too? I saw the en directory under _topics which is same structure as _posts hence was wondering if it's the case. Can I create a ja directory for topics and make a PR?

[harding]

Hi @haegwan, thanks for the suggestions!

Topic page update : the NL 73 includes links to Topic page such as "Trampoline payments" and "Multipath payments" but on "Optech newsletter and website mentions" section of these pages, the newsletter 73 is not mentioned.

Correct. This is expected, as we wrote in our announcement of the topic pages, we're only currently planning to make monthly updates. I'm planning to submit updates on (or near) the first of each month.

Not quite familiar with Jekyll's functionality but it'd be better to check if the Topic page can dynamically pull all the mentions to it or if not, making sure to update the topic page on every NL release.

It would certainly be possible to add a test to our infrastructure to ensure cross-linking, but we discussed the update frequency during the development of the topic feature (1, 2) and decided not to update the topic index on each newsletter release. Part of the reasoning was that we often need to make last-minute edits to the newsletter which might break any backlinks from the topic section, so doing monthly updates was seen as a way to minimize the maintenance burden. (As an example of last-minute edits, both newsletter 73 and 72 had sections about the Bitcoin Core 0.19 release, but they were both yanked last minute due to delays in the release.)

Topic page translation : Do we have a plan to translate the Topic pages too? I saw the en directory under _topics which is same structure as _posts hence was wondering if it's the case. Can I create a ja directory for topics and make a PR?

That won't automatically work, sorry. It'll just add a Japanese-language page to the full index. Someone would have to go in and globalize the topic pages, like @bitschmidty did for the newsletter pages, before localized content can be added.

[haegwan]

Hi @harding - first, thank you so much for your prompt response!

Correct. This is expected, as we wrote in our announcement of the topic pages, we're only currently planning to make monthly updates. I'm planning to submit updates on (or near) the first of each month.

Oops sorry for raising the issue without reading the announcement throughly. The monthly update makes sense and sounds good to me under the mentioned condition. Thanks for the clarification.

That won't automatically work, sorry. It'll just add a Japanese-language page to the full index. Someone would have to go in and globalize the topic pages, like @bitschmidty did for the newsletter pages, before localized content can be added.

Thanks for your note! Hello @bitschmidty, do you have any plan to localize the topic pages too? Let me know if you have anything in your mind!

[jnewbery]

My two cents: if we chose to translate the topics pages, we should only translate the 'excerpt' and 'extended summary' sections (which are fairly static), and not try to translate the names of the links (which will be updated regularly).

@haegwan - there are currently ~40 topic pages, and we plan to bring that up to ~100 by the end of 2020. Are you interested in translating those?

[haegwan]

@jnewbery Agree with what you pointed out, i.e. translating only 'excerpt' and 'extended summary' sections. I'm happy to translate the ~100 topics. Please let me know how I can get started.

[jnewbery]

@bitschmidty - can you help here? @haegwan wants to translate the topics indexes. Are we able to incorporate those into the site?