I Had to Redesign This Site Again
I recently decided to take on the task of redesigning my site. The flashbang of a “black on white text with a little bit of blue” was getting stale, and I found myself once again not writing as often as I would like to because the effort involved in maintaining the underlying framework for the site was becoming a hassle. Granted, I had mentioned in “I Don’t Want To Ever Do This Again”, that I… did not want to do this again. Thankfully, I wasn’t migrating from one site generator to another this time.
I’ll be going over what’s changed in the site’s design, beyond the visual changes, as I’m very pleased with the outcome. Much like the redesign I did in 2018, I had several goals I desired before I was willing to hit publish. Just as last time, here is a checklist of things I wanted, and what I achieved:
Let’s get started with the CDN usage. The previous site design would in some cases download a large amount of data from multiple CDNs (about 4 - 8, depending on what was loaded on a given page). This has been changed. I now use only 3 CDNs: jsDelivr, Google Fonts, and the CDN provided by the creator of the Inter font, available via https://rsms.me, which I believe is hosted via CloudFlare. I might reduce this further down to 2 in the future, if I can get Inter to work as I’d like it to. I also reduced several assets to improve memory usage. The biggest is I’ve removed a very ancient version of FontAwesome in favor of a custom font I generated via icomoon. This allowed me to reduce the number of assets downloaded for users, and also allowed me to have more control over how my icons are rendered. I also chose to make the emoji on my site use just one font, because I can’t rely on folks getting the right point across with platform specific emoji (This does in some cases cause some numbers to be rendered with emoji, but those are browser rendering bugs from what I’ve been able to gather)
