In the last few weeks I’ve worked on the repository that makes the pages of www.aros.org. The top menu included AROS.ORG, AROS-EXEC, ARCHIVES, and POWER2PEOPLE. I didn’t like that because it didn’t show the purpose of those links. Additionally, AROS-EXEC is almost gone because it exists only as a sub-forum of www.arosworld.org. It was a somewhat cumbersome task because the links were rendered in an image. Anyways, now we have AROS.ORG, Forum, Software, and Bounties, with Forum pointing to www.arosworld.org. Yes, that’s now our official forum.

menu

The download page was in bad shape. Almost all distributions had dead links. That was solved with the help of their maintainers. Additionally, I have removed the link to the page that showed the ABIv0 nightly builds. Those builds are no longer created from the Team AROS repository since AROS’ source repository was moved from Sourceforge to Github.

“ThatGuyWithTheKids” appeared on the AROS Exec Discord server and said that he wants to port the scripts that build the website to Python 3. What a nice surprise. Kalamatee once started that job and kept the unfinished work in a branch on Github. Having the scripts in Python 3 helps a lot because Python 2 is phased out and is no longer available for Ubuntu. I added Python 3 and Pillow to the Azure pipeline scripts that trigger building the website. The website is built automatically whenever a document change is committed.

I brought back the RSS feeds that show the most recent uploads to archives.aros-exec.org and the most recent forum posts at www.arosworld.org. At first, I ported the already existing script for the Github commits to Python 3. Then I made copies and adapted them to the 2 other feeds. All 3 feeds are created from the same Azure script. I added a time trigger that runs the script every 3 hours.

I added a new section with YouTube videos to the links page. There are actually 7 entries: 2 developers, 2 distribution maintainers and 3 generic channels.

The status page had a funny issue. The values were shown with many digits (e.g. 82.43642814902425%). That was a result of the Python 2 to 3 transfer. Python 3 has changed the default for divisions from integer to floating point. That was easy to solve. I’ve soon given up on updating the status page because it’s based on a database with 3036 lines.

The contact page now has links to the Discord servers AROS Exec and AmigaDev. There is still work needed. The Slack channel is deserted since the maintainer changed the rules. The messages are only kept for 90 days with the free account. Some other pages tell you to join the developer mailing list, but the link to that list is no longer on the contact page. I’m not sure if I should bring back that link.

I checked the links on www.aros.org with linkchecker. First I looked for internal errors. The tool ran 45 minutes and exposed over 900 errors. How can that be? Well, we have 13 languages for our website. Every page which isn’t translated by a human is a copy from the English page. The URL has an additional language specifier like /de/, /el/ etc. Some pages had relative links to resources like images and header files but because the build script inserts the language specifiers the links didn’t work for the translated pages. Other issue was a missing slash so that a link like pictures/screenshots was translated to pictures/screenshots.php.

Then I added to option to check the external links to linkchecker. I’ve limited the search to the English pages. Many dead links were in the news archive. I didn’t want to waste too much time with news entries which were created over 20 years ago. If I couldn’t find easily a replacement I’ve removed the link and added the text “(dead link removed)”. Besides I found some pages which still had the text “Amiga Research OS”. I’ve replaced that with “AROS Research OS”.

I’m done for now. Sometime in the next weeks I’ll check the content.