Plutonic Rainbows

During the Phase 2 redundancy cleanup of the My Blog Project repository, significant improvements were achieved across three key areas of optimisation. The image asset cleanup successfully removed 6 unused files totalling approximately 1.6MB of storage, including the elimination of an exact duplicate (eternity.webp) while preserving the referenced version (eternity_1990.webp).

This optimisation resulted in a perfectly efficient image repository with 100% utilisation of all 10 remaining assets. Duplicate post file resolution addressed content redundancy by removing 2 duplicate markdown files after careful content analysis—specifically, removing an earlier announcement post about the “A Fire Within” fragrance in favour of a more detailed review, and consolidating two different “Bois Talisman” posts by keeping the more informative technical review.

The virtual environment dependency audit revealed that previous maintenance had already optimized the package set from the originally identified 34 packages down to 19 essential dependencies, with the only required action being the restoration of the bleach package for HTML sanitization functionality.

Combined with the previously completed Phase 1 log file cleanup, the total repository optimisation achieved approximately 165.6MB in storage savings while maintaining full functionality and improving overall repository health and maintenance efficiency.

I resolved a functionality issue with Lightbox2, where image links were opening in separate pages instead of displaying in the intended lightbox overlay. The problem was traced to build_blog.py, where HTML sanitization was stripping out the essential data-lightbox and data-title attributes required by Lightbox2. To fix this, I updated the ALLOWED_ATTRIBUTES configuration to preserve these specific attributes while retaining the overall security of the HTML sanitization. I then updated all relevant documentation files — CHANGELOG.md, CLAUDE.md, and ISSUES_AND_IMPROVEMENTS.md — to reflect this improvement in version 1.6.0, and committed and pushed the changes to the remote repository with a detailed commit message explaining the technical solution.

I need to undertake extensive work on this blog over the coming weeks. There are numerous issues to address, including structural improvements and the removal of existing redundancies.

I have successfully addressed all critical issues identified in the redundancy analysis for the blog project. The most significant improvement was cleaning up the massive log files that were consuming 164MB of storage – the build.log (28MB) and deploy.log (136MB) have been cleared down to minimal placeholder files of 44 bytes each.

To prevent this issue from recurring, I updated the .gitignore file to use a comprehensive *.log pattern instead of the previous specific deploy.log entry, ensuring all future log files will be excluded from version control.

Upon investigation, the reported orphaned pagination files (index2.html through index103.html) were found to not actually exist – the build system is correctly generating index.html for the first page and page2.html, page3.html, etc., for subsequent pages as intended.

These changes provide immediate benefits including substantial storage savings, cleaner repository structure, improved deployment efficiency, and prevention of future log file bloat in the codebase.