Long time no see

Reasons for change

The old website was built with WordPress🔗, a Content Management System🔗 (CMS) that makes it easy to design, publish, and manage content but also adds complexity, higher resource usage, and reliance on multiple technologies and plugins. Additionally, support for user logins and dynamic content means a larger attack surface, making the site more vulnerable to hackers and bots. Since I’m the only one creating content here and I’m fine without a friendly user interface, I’d prefer a leaner site for the few posts I occasionally make.

The new site

In broad brush strokes, I went with the existing design. I didn’t like a few things with the former Photofocus🔗 WordPress theme like how the posts were listed or how I had to compromise on free gallery plugins. Now the compromise was my very limited UI developer experience. I had carved some resolutions into tungsten, one is: [solar-] sail into the chaotic plasma currents of JavaScript and the nebulous labyrinth of CSS only when absolutely necessary. In order to have the least dependencies and to develop custom widgets for my own self-amusement, I coded the new website basically from scratch.

For a static site like this, you need to re-generate the site after every change. I used a static site generator tool called 11ty🔗 (also as Eleventy🔗). It’s great, has a broad functionality and a good documentation, it works and it’s free. (Thanks a bunch!) I even used GitLab’s issue tracker to have all my feature requirements, ideas and bugs organised. This way I could easily choose the task I had the most mood for (makes a huge difference). Some small issues still need to be fixed but it would have been a constant source of mild anxiety postponing the release because of issues I might not address for a while.

Some new features

• Current news / message of the day on the front page
• Selectable light and dark theme on the sidebar
• Blog post list has infinite scrolling
• Copy ink colour RGB code to clipboard on click (sidebar, swatches in posts)

  Visconti
  Blue

• Share blog post URL button in post header
• Silly 404 page, nonsensical sidebar widgets on the about page and other youthful scallywaggery.

Performance gains

As you can see, the memory consumptiongot significantly lower. With some further tuning and downsizing the memory of my server, I could save on hosting considerably.

The changes to the site are advantageous for the visitors too. Since I don't use a bunch of rich JavaScript & CSS libraries, it uses less resources on the client side as well. Though this is a much less noticeable improvement.