Tag: Web

After the acquisition of Twitter by the South African con-man and billionaire the free and open source social network world is generating a lot of heat. The number of users and nodes of Mastodon in particular and the Fediverse at large has been climbing steadily for months now. However, there is no shortage of people who voice their concerns about the federated nature of such services, which rely on centralized instances governed by small dictators with absolute power. But this is not the post to discuss these issues.

I’ve once again changed the design of the site to make it cleaner, more simple and above all, less bloated. I’ve removed a bunch of javascript code (for instance, MathJax is no longer loaded by the main template but by the actual pages that really need it). Also, I’ve simplified the color palette settling on a black on white scheme with green for links and titles.

The new design also looks better on mobile screens, as I took some care of adapting the templates for pocket devices. Finally, I changed the home page from the blog summary listing to an introduction and welcome page, and added a full blog listing page containing a list of all blog post titles sorted by date.

The idea of ditching both my web hosting provider and Drupal has been at the back of my mind for a few months.

Bear with me. Since about 2011 I have been maintaining this website using the cheapest hosting tier my hosting offers – At least it was the cheapest at the time I got it. They call it The Essential and it costs over 300 bucks for 2 years. It is not a lot, but it is definitely too much for my purposes of hosting a small blog where I provide occasional updates on my projects, my portfolio and my CV.

Also, loading times are horribly long and the complexity of managing the Drupal installation (upgrades/updates) and also the database takes way too much of my time. Only the thought of updating to Drupal 8 sends shivers down my spine and ultimately got me searching for better options.

As you may have noted, I updated the look and feel of the website to a more sober, greenish and polished design. The moon in the header has been replaced by a jumping monkey, which is always likeable. Regarding performance, this new site has less and smaller CSS files and less images and therefore it loads faster. Additionally, it uses HTML5, which is good. I also took the opportunity to update to the latest version of drupal and make use of the newer ZEN base theme.