[Announcement] GTFS.org had a facelift

[eliasmbd]

🤩GTFS.org had a facelift 🤩

We’ve been hard at work gathering feedback and working to make GTFS.org the only place you need to visit for everything GTFS.

Whether you’re new to the transit specification or a seasoned GTFS veteran, GTFS.org has everything you need.

Here are some of the changes you can expect to see during your first visit:

• New design and navigation to better guide visitors.
• A Getting Started section highlighting the basics of GTFS and its Features.
• A Community Section to help you get involved in the development of GTFS
• The new home of the GTFS Digest in the Blog Section.

[skinkie]

A little bit tinyier "mobilitydata" would certainly be more modest.

…

-- Stefan

[ungoldman]

FYI looks like at least one link indexed by search engines is broken now -- https://gtfs.org/schedule/best-practices now forwards to https://gtfs.org/documentation/schedule/GTFS%2520schedule%2520best%2520Practices/ (404). Possibly a faulty redirect rule?

[eliasmbd]

FYI looks like at least one link indexed by search engines is broken now -- https://gtfs.org/schedule/best-practices now forwards to https://gtfs.org/documentation/schedule/GTFS%2520schedule%2520best%2520Practices/ (404). Possibly a faulty redirect rule?

@ungoldman Thanks for bringing it up. We just made the changes to make sure it redirects properly to https://gtfs.org/documentation/schedule/schedule_best_practices/, it should work now.

Make sure to delete your cookies and try again via your search engine.

[ungoldman]

Thanks @eliasmbd, redirect looks fixed to me.

Changing dashes to underscores in URLs... seems like not a best practice? 😈

Nice redesign! 👍

[abyrd]

Hi, I just took a closer look at the updated page and noted that a full page load takes between 4 and 12 seconds (over fiber optic connection but from Hong Kong). The background image is not the main factor. There seems to be a search index that's over 8MB compressed and expanding to 20MB. Based on a quick look at the contents, it looks like it might contain a complete copy of the site contents (including a lot of HTML tags) for every translation language, including cases where the translation is incomplete and is just a copy of the English text. I don't have a specific suggestion, but there is probably a more efficient way to provide search capabilities. People might pull up a single reference page on a phone just to read one block of text, but end up pulling down a copy of the entire site. In a way it also runs counter to structuring the site as separate pages for different topics and translations if downloading any one page effectively downloads the whole site.

[abyrd]

Thanks @eliasmbd, redirect looks fixed to me.
Changing dashes to underscores in URLs... seems like not a best practice? 😈

So were the URLs of all the reference documentation changed to use underscores instead of dashes? What was the rationale for this change?

[eliasmbd]

@abyrd As we were building GTFS.org, I believe that we were debating how to format the files without considering best practices. We have since then replaced underscores with dashes to be compliant. @ungoldman thanks for bringing this to light.

As for loading times, it should be better now. Please let us know if it is not the case.

[ungoldman]

Sounds good, thank you for thinking about this @eliasmbd! If you haven't already, please consider adding additional redirects from the underscored URLs to help any people following those links reach their intended destination. Routing is hard! 😅 🚌 ❤

[eliasmbd]

@ungoldman We also implemented re-directs that we know excisted out there. If there are any that don't work, please let us know :)

[abyrd]

As for loading times, it should be better now. Please let us know if it is not the case.

Confirmed, the page reaches a complete-looking state in about 2 sec and without waiting on any particularly large files.