I read Tomasz Tunguz’s writeup on his website rewrite, and took some inspiration. After a long run yesterday, it seemed like a fun little project to sit down with a cup of decaf and re-examine this website. Ended up being a bit more than a one-morning project, but mostly fit within a weekend.

The main items I tackled were:

  • Moved to Hugo from Jekyll for static HTML generation
  • Eliminated TravisCI and CloudFlare in favor of Netlify for deployment, content delivery, and HTTPS. Fewer moving pieces, fewer things to specify (no more travis.yaml to monkey with, etc.)
  • Keep the look-and-feel (from a PixelUnion theme, originally), but build the site, layout, Hugo theme, and CSS from scratch; there was more code than necessary for a simple site
  • Added Masonry to replicate previous layout functionality - there appears to be no straightforward way to do this without javascript
  • Remove Google Analytics - I don’t derive much value from tracking small numbers, and prefer it when sites don’t track me
  • Revert to simple typefaces, reducing dependencies (e.g., Google Fonts)
  • Revert back to all original images (I’d ended up with some lossy compression along the way)
  • Try out Forestry.io

Haven’t yet:

  • Optimized images for (e.g.) responsive layout
  • Addressed some aspects of the previous layout
    • Pagination
    • Left-hand navigation
    • Date rollover

Results:

  • Improved Google PageSpeed Insights score to 99 from 80
  • Improved SolarWinds Pingdom performance grade to 98 from 74, load time to 1.77 seconds from 4.79 seconds
  • Time to check in, build, and deploy an update (e.g., change to a post via Forestry.io): ~15 seconds