No still

A page shows a video kept on YouTube or Vimeo, and reads the video’s still, the picture shown in its place until a reader presses play. No still for the video is in the site’s fetched/stills/ folder, so the page has none: still is empty.

What you’ll see

warning  No still: no picture has been fetched for this video yet
  Run `statac refresh` to fetch one.
  More: https://statac.dev/e/no-still/

In the terminal the message also names the file and line where there is one, and marks the exact text.

Why Statac warns

A page that loads a video site’s player as it opens tells that site of every reader who visits, whether or not they watch. Showing a still instead, and loading the player only when the reader presses play, tells it of no one until then. The still is fetched from the video site once, by statac refresh, and kept in the site, since statac build never uses the network: a build of the same files is the same every time, and works with no connection at all.

Statac says so once for each video, however many pages show it: at the call in the writing where the writing shows the video, and otherwise in the template. Where the video site answered that it has no picture for the video, fetched/record says absent against it, statac refresh doesn’t ask again, and the warning says so.

How to fix it

Run statac refresh in the site’s folder. It fetches the still of every video a page reads one for, into fetched/stills/, and says what it fetched. Commit fetched/ with the rest of the site.

Where the video site has no picture, show one of your own: a snippet can take your picture as an argument of its own, such as poster, and show it with page.photo in place of the still.

Once you have understood it, the warning can be quietened by name.

Example

In content/post-1.md:

@youtube("https://youtu.be/abcdefghijk")

After statac refresh:

Fetched `fetched/stills/youtube-abcdefghijk.jpg`.
Fetched 1 still.

In statac.yaml, to stop it being shown:

quiet: [no-still]

Its name

Name	no-still
In the terminal	statac explain no-still
To stop showing it	quiet: [no-still] in statac.yaml, once you have understood it. Statac still counts it.