Site redesigned. Random thoughts

Aug 25, 2016

Please let me know what you think of the current site design. It's my own creation.

Disqus and it's ilk suck: it pushes tracking, advertising, and proprietary javascript on your users. The comments aren't saved by archive.org. People have lots more reasons they dislike it. NPR just deleted 2.8 billion Disqus comments. I didn't find any simple way to add self hosted comments, so I wrote my own. Later, I did find some solutions, but I'm partial to my own.

I originally used Jekyll (the most popular static site generator), but I ditched it and made my own site generator. It's only complex enough for my own needs, and It was fun. One nice thing is I'm much faster than Jekyll, so I can handle page regen on comment submission without performance worries. I regen a page in 120ms, compared to jekyll at 430 ms, and I have no idea if that would grow when the site grew etc.

Although I don't use much javascript (none on this page), I added javascript license data so the librejs extension can detect that it is free software. It was pretty easy, and I recommend it.