better errors for usability

[victor-shepardson]

The user experience of editing files on github and refreshing the site is pretty sharp-edged, especially for non-programmers. But Even running the site locally and knowing javascript, I often don't get a descriptive error in the terminal or browser console.

Examples:

• syntax errors in markdown and json files often cause silent failures -- would be good if the offending file could always print to browser console, better yet if the syntax error could be printed
• when adding new people to the "People" page, it is necessary to edit order.json. if there are people with md files but no entries in order.json, they don't appear on the page. If there are entries in order.json without md files, the page breaks with an inscrutable error. Ideally, the page would be robust to a mismatch or at least identify order.json as the source of the problem.

[victor-shepardson]

I wonder if there is any non-developer friendly way to edit site files with better syntax highlighting than github provides? github's editor doesn't indicate obvious syntax errors in JSON files.

[jarmitage]

syntax errors in markdown and json files often cause silent failures -- would be good if the offending file could always print to browser console, better yet if the syntax error could be printed

This is handled by https://github.com/pngwn/MDsveX, maybe there's some config there to provide extra insight

when adding new people to the "People" page, it is necessary to edit order.json. if there are people with md files but no entries in order.json, they don't appear on the page. If there are entries in order.json without md files, the page breaks with an inscrutable error. Ideally, the page would be robust to a mismatch or at least identify order.json as the source of the problem.

The order could be stored in the individual markdown headers to eliminate this, but I don't know if that's a better solution or not.

Basically a lot of the usability issues come from the compromise between layout complexity and the simplicity of markdown files with metadata headers.