Running ./serve-blog does not serve 3 latest blog posts

[alexsoble]

Expected Behavior

From the README:

./serve-blog: This will eliminate all but the latest three blog posts, but keeps the rest of the site intact.

Actual Behavior

When I make a new blog post locally and run ./serve-blog, I should see that blog post first when I visit http://0.0.0.0:4000/site/blog/. Instead, I see an older blog post:

"Ask 18F — Can you share any tips or suggestions on designing surveys and forms?" By Elaine Kamlley , Austin Hernandez April 5, 2018

Steps to reproduce the behavior

• Create a new blog post locally
• Run ./serve-blog
• Visit http://0.0.0.0:4000/site/blog

This issue is done when:

• I can create a new blog post locally, run ./serve-blog, visit http://0.0.0.0:4000/site/blog, and see the new blog post.

[alexsoble]

@lsgitter Did you mean to close this one?

[beechnut]

A little more info for when we end up addressing this issue. When I ran serve-blog and then serve, serve showed the same two blog posts that serve-blog did. This suggests that serve-blog is a destructive command. It took manually deleting _site/ and re-running serve to get all the blog posts to display.

[Sgtpluck]

I started looked at this issue, and it's doubtful that this script ever did exactly what it was supposed to do. It determines which posts to include based on a list of file names from the "./_posts" directory, which doesn't come back in date-order.

It's probably fixable, but I started wondering about the use case for this. Is there one? I am inclined to just delete this command.

I have discovered a different issue, which I think is probably worth trying to solve, which is that the pagination plugin doesn't seem to "see/render" a new blog post unless either you:

• delete the _site directory and reserve the files entirely or;
• change a .html file (I discovered this when I was printing variables to blog/index.html trying to determine when paginator.posts updates)

This issue has been open for a long time, so I am inclined to:

• delete the ./serve-blog file
• delete associated config files (which were messy and mostly unnecessary anyways)
• delete documentation referencing this command
• open a new issue referencing the problem serving a new blog post.

If I don't hear from anyone on this ticket in the next week, I will assume that that's the right course of action and open a PR. Thanks!

[Dahianna]

I am not an expert, but if you can still preview changes to the blog locally without the ./serve-blog then I have no issue deleting it and cleaning up the files.

[beechnut]

My understanding is that the use case was to build the site with minimal content for speed, to more quickly iterate on changes.

(But I don't work on this repo at all, so you'll get no objections from me.)

[Sgtpluck]

@Dahianna I won't be eliminating the ./serve command, which I assume is how folks are currently previewing changes, since ./serve-blog doesn't work as expected!

@beechnut I think that was the idea, but it's unclear to me if that actually ever worked in effect!

thanks for your feedback, all.

[geekygirlsarah]

I'm late to the party, but I'll toss in that I run my personal site on a Jekyll system like this, and every change I make takes about a minute to regenerate the whole blog. So if I'm updating something, I usually temporarily delete most/all the blog posts to make it take about 2 seconds. So I think the ./serve-blog was intended to do the same thing.

tl;dr I agree with @beechnut.

Also I'm fine with removing that command and we can re-add it back if we ever find a way to make it work.