Website Update 2023

In the last days I have been experimenting with this website. I love fonts and typography, so I tried to introduce a new font on this website. But even with woff2 compression, it still accounted to almost half the size of the total website (~43KB) on average page load. And since one of the main goals of this website is to be lightweight and simple, I had to throw it out again. Instead, I switched from serif Georgia to the sans-serif Helvetica Neue, using Arial as a fallback.

Then I tackled the CSS. I was able to simplify the HTML structure, saving almost half of the CSS file size (going down from 5.19 KB to 2.44 KB). Additionally I introduced a new rule: There will only be 1 large image allowed per page.

In the CMS backend (Kirby has a beautiful backend blueprint work) I introduced a new format for the start page of the website. It now contains an introduction and a slogan, allowing more flexibility in structure and display. I killed the Talks section. Probably I will bring it back later.

What is coming up

Some more things will be changing in the next days & weeks. I will eventually create a better navigation and extend the one at the bottom. Furthermore I would like to introduce tags to articles and extend the article list. Since I want to write more (again), I will create some user-friendly navigation through the article storage (pagination, archives by month etc.). The article page itself will still be simple, but I want to make it easier to browse the article archives.

End of last year I discovered the so-called mind gardens in the web - simple parts of your own website in which you keep your notes and your texts. I tried out many tools to keep track of my ideas and texts but abandoned all of them. So maybe I give my own website a try.

Finally, I want to experiment with cookie-free statistics. Still I don't like to include requests to foreign domains, so I will probably use an on-prem Matomo on my own hosting.