Update

So, recently I’ve been deep diving into Google Analytics’s new implementations and testing for things at work, personal thoughts on GA4… it’s not going to be end-user friendly, that is I don’t think you’re every day mom and pop blogger is going to find it the most simple of things in life to use; with the changes to the reports its kind of a pain in the neck, but I digress.

What is happening on this site? It’s been kind of dead lately and that is my fault entirely so to get this back up and running again I’m doing a bit of a double project.

#100DaysToOffload

Firstly, I’ll be trying to kick on with #100DaysToOffload on this site. If you’ve never heard of that before, it is basically setting a goal to have 100 new posts in the space of a year (in this case I’m going to be doing within a 12 month period as the year is almost 3/4 of the way though).

The main idea of this is to get writing, to have a project that is not work related and to have some focus on a goal. That and I might end up posting about something completely random that helps someone along the way.

There is no set topic that will be covered, obviously whatever topic is covered it’ll most likely have a tech focus on some shape or form. I have a few little projects in mind as I’ve managed to finally get part of a home server up and running and I want to expand and document that a great deal better than I had previously.

1MB loaded

So this is more of a personal challenge than anything else, but I’ve been looking into how to make this site as light and tiny as possible. This does mean there are going to be a couple of changes here and there to the design and layout. I’m not going to go as crazy extreme as some other sites that I have seen (big list can be found here), but I’m going to try and push it as far as I’m able to comfortably.

Changes to come

Theme/CSS changes

I think the first thing to change is going to be the overall colour scheme. Right now there are two CSS themes that are being loaded at the same time (within one file) with a JS switch on the top right of the page that controls the theme.

What I’ll be most likely doing is removing the selector at the top of the site. I’ve found that it’s not used all that often. I added a JS event to fire to GA when it was clicked but it really is not used all that often so it’ll be likely to go, along with it half the CSS file and the JS theme changer script/file as well.

Minimizing Off-site Calls

By this I mean that I’ll be looking to load fonts locally or discard any Google Fonts altogether. This should not only speed the loading time of the site up but it should also remove a couple of lines out of theme.

Removing Waste

The main thing that comes to mind here is Feather and possibly Google Analytics. Right now both of these scripts account for 99% of the total load time on the site, with Google Analytics accounting for just under half and Feather just over half.

Currently the only thing that feather is being used for is the GitHub and Twitter icons in the footer, as these aren’t being used really at all I’ll probably remove the links or change to just text.

Conclusion

With that there should be a bit more activity here over the next few months (I know I’ve said it before but actually have things to talk about for once).

Feel free to stick around :)