Origami Newsletter, September 2020

TL;DR: This issue features image service cost saving and promoted content teasers.

Top Things

These are some of the bigger things we’ve done over the last month.

Image Service Cost Savings

The Origami Image Service transforms images for many FT Group products, e.g. by format, quality, dimension, or tint. We noticed that lots of images included by our products are actually the exact same image, but hosted on a different URL. To optimise for this situation the Image Service now generates a key based on the image content. The key is compared against other images to avoid storing duplicates.

This work has saved at least ~$900 a month against our storage costs. Previously we stored 36 million images (3.34 Terabytes) which is now down to 7.8 million (0.49 Terabytes). 🎉

Partner Content Teaser

This month the Ads & Privacy team worked on a test to replace our paid post teasers with a new partner content teaser. The test was a success. According to Dan’s release email there was a 17% uplift in teaser click through rate; 7% uplift in median time spent on branded content pages; and a 110% uplift in the percentage of readers that were from internal traffic (compared to social media traffic drivers).

Following the successful test, the Origami team worked with the Ads & Privacy team to move the test implementation to the o-teaser component. This allowed us to document the change; remove related technical debt from projects; and roll out partner content teasers to more projects, including the app.

Special Thanks

Special thanks this week to the Ads & Privacy team, particularly Carles Andres, for their help in tidying up projects to release the new partner content teaser.

Broader Update

A digest of other things that have happened since our last update:

• MINOR: o-cookie-message adds a deprecation warning for unused options.
• MINOR: o-header moves Customer Products style overrides into o-header where appropriate, to be shared with other teams consistently; fixes a regression in the transparent variant which made links difficult to see and documents the variants limitations.
• MINOR: origami-navigation-service upgrades its o-header example.
• MINOR: o-topper extracts Customer Products specific logic for mapping article data to a topper to n-map-content-to-topper, which may also be used for server-side rendering (great work, Keran Braich!)
• MINOR: origami-component-converter automates publishing to npm, adds a module entrypoint to package.json with an ESM build, along with the browser entrypoint for a CommonJS build, when components are published to npm.
• MINOR: origami-specialist-title-logos adds a new FT Live logo.
• MINOR: polyfill-service adds a polyfill-specific hero image (thanks to Gabrielle von Koss! 🙌 Gabi no longer works at the FT but used to be a member of the Origami team); adds the latest version of polyfill-library bringing Intl.DateTimeFormat, Intl.ListFormat, Intl.DisplayNames, and Intl.NumberFormat support.
• PATCH: o-autoinit lists CustomEvent as a required polyfill.
• PATCH: o-colors corrects oColorsMix documentation (thanks Kiya Gurmesa!)
• PATCH: o-forms corrects suffixed button colour given valid input; improves guidance to make it harder to copy inaccessible markup.
• PATCH: o-header-services introduces drawer navigation fixes for IE11; removes focusable elements from dropdown menus for keyboard accessibility.
• PATCH: o-teaser updates paid post teaser to a new prompted content teaser.
• PATCH: origami-build-tools compiles demos and includes the CustomEvent polyfill for testing in IE11.
• PATCH: origami-component-manifest-linter refactors code, adds many new tests, bugfixes, and documentation.
• PATCH: origami-template-repository updates to latest version of Origami workflows.
• PATCH: scrumple rewrites Scrumple JavaScript to ES5 syntax to work in IE11 without compilation.
• All components: add extension to relative JavaScript imports to make the code work directly in a browser without compilation.