Some of you, my fellow readers, have probably noticed some downtime on my website yesterday. I migrated my blog to another hosting provider. That’s the only reason. You’re asking why? Well, I like a certain level of consistency in some areas of my interests. But in technology, especially in IT, the only consistency is constant change. So i decided to move my website (again).
How it all started…
It all began on Twitter when I joined a discussion about where to place the search bar or search field on a website:
Some for bloggers, in your theme it makes sense to have your search bar at the top. Doing some vExpert validation and have trouble finding the search bar often. If people hit the home page of your blog they will want to be able to find something quick usually, move it up!
— Duncan Epping (@DuncanYB) April 5, 2018
That led us to the conclusion that a website should have no clutter and no word / tag clouds. I agree with that, since it’s not up to date anymore. But hey, that’s just my personal opinion.
That was my goal when I did my design.
No clutter, no word-cloud.
Simple Tags list, Archive (date list) and search.
Only thing I am a little uncertain of, is if the date/author info of a post should be at the top or the bottom.https://t.co/rPvavIaEd0— Mads Fog Albrechtslund (@Hazenet) April 5, 2018
And the discussion finally ended at the performance of a website.
Not only lean but also quicker loading / responding because of less plugins / additional traffic when Google Analytics is disabled.
— Karl Widmer (@widmerkarl) April 5, 2018
I did some testings on my “old” website / provider and i wasn’t very sad about the results, but also not very happy. There is always room for improvements. So i did some research on the topic of using WordPress as content management system but providing static websites. Delivering static content like HTML files and images is way faster then delivering dynamic content. Even if you’re working with caching plugins and all that stuff. At least some of the content is still dynamic, thus generated when you’re accessing the website. Please don’t blame me if i’m not 100% correct, i’m not a professional web developer, but at least i know some basics here.
When you look at these tweets, you will find at least two solution which generate static content out of dynamic content, gohugo.io and jekyll. I think both solutions are great, if you know basic stuff about frameworks, programming languages and some more stuff. I tried it, i really tried it. But i failed. In my eyes both solutions are complex to setup and maintain. As i said, i’m not a pro web dev. And if you’re used to certain content management systems like WordPress, then it’s hard to switch.
I moved on with my research. As my employer is using various cloud solutions, like Amazon, i thought why not going (back) to Amazon?