Still Here for at Least Another Year

April 19, 2021 at 12:42 pm

I recent­ly re-upped my site host­ing for anoth­er year. *plug* Bluehost for the win. *end plug* That of course had me think­ing about impact and lega­cy. These ram­blings only con­tin­ue to exist because I put in vary­ing degrees of effort and money each year. Blogs (like life) are not a set-and-done thing but a con­stant, con­tin­u­ous, tending-to that must be fed to stay sur­vive. Having dead blogs lit­ter my RSS library, I know the ten­den­cy to entropy is always lurk­ing. URLs and site struc­tures some­times change; a tech­nol­o­gy stack might be upgrad­ed and feed func­tions don’t make the cut. Link rot is real and sur­pris­ing­ly fast.

My first post — in all its infan­tile ick — is still here. The feed has con­tin­ued to work for ten years even through hia­tus. Those are some minor accom­plish­ments that I’m going to be proud of today. It’s not much and it does­n’t have to be. We should be cel­e­brat­ing the zero vic­to­ries when all we do is stave off the heat death of decay. That’s more sus­tain­able than over­pro­duc­ing for the sim­ple sake of con­sump­tion. Now, time to tend some weeds both in my dig­i­tal and phys­i­cal garden.

Let’s Internet Like 1998

September 15, 2014 at 3:01 pm

Last Wednesday, September 10th was a call to action for sup­port­ing net neu­tral­i­ty. Lots of great com­pa­nies and peo­ple joined in spread­ing the word includ­ing yours truly.

The fun­ni­est thing to come out of this pub­lic out­cry so far is Comcastify.js by The Onion. This script cov­ers up your images and slow­ly reveals them like an old dial-up con­nec­tion. It’s witty, snarky, and spot on. It could be used for good since you can con­trol the speed and amount of reveal for each step.

Site Performance Starting Point

August 15, 2014 at 11:00 am

With the redesign this week, I’m shift­ing to a more con­tin­u­ous devel­op­ment process. Tweak, break, fix, rinse, repeat. Before things set­tled too much I want­ed to get a per­for­mance base­line of the new theme in action. You have to have a start­ing point in order to judge improve­ment — so here are the numbers.

Size
in KB		 Requests Empty cache
in seconds		 Primed cache
in seconds		 Cached Size
in KB
Home Page 30.1 10 2.95 2.82 24.6
Blog 210.1 12 4.16 2.69 202.6
Post 1 286.1 23 5.12 3.59 280.4
Post 2 220.9 16 2.79 2.99 220.9

 

Methodology

All num­bers come from Firebug 2.0.3 run­ning on Firefox 31. Times above are the aver­age of three tests for each scenario.

Takeaways

Already on the to-do list is to imple­ment a build process with Grunt. That will take care of low­er­ing the request num­bers once the mul­ti­ple JS and CSS files are com­bined. It should also trim a few kilo­bytes once it ugli­fies everything.

Second, and more impor­tant, is upgrad­ing host­ing. The shared host­ing on Bluehost is great. I’ve never had any prob­lems, tons of fea­tures, and things work won­der­ful for the price. Now that I’m get­ting seri­ous and look­ing at the num­bers, per­for­mance is where you take the hit. Waiting for a response from the serv­er var­ied wild­ly with the quick­est response tak­ing 837 mil­lisec­onds and aver­ag­ing 2.69 seconds.

Not a bad start­ing point but it will def­i­nite­ly get better.