The new, same website

If you’re reading this, then I’ve updated my website. Here’s the kicker: you might not notice many differences with the previous version. After all, it looks mostly the same, with minor styling tweaks here and there.

What you’re looking at is a complete rewrite of the entire website.

Previously, my website was powered by Laravel 4, which is quite old by now. Earlier this year, I moved the website over to Laravel 5.8 (I started from scratch) and made significant changes. Here’s how it’s different under the hood.

For me, as an administrator, the website is easier to use than ever. Why, you might ask? Well, I can now make use of my custom back-end, Atlas.

This package, “atlas-core”, is the first step I’m taking in building a customizable and tweakable admin panel for my website. I expect to be able to reuse it for other projects as well.

In general, the entire website is smaller. Which means it gets to you quicker! For the homepage, at the time of writing, the previous version came in at 143.35 KB transferred. The new version comes in 80.16 KB transferred. (Assuming that no images are present on the currently featured article.)

All of the underlying HTML has been changed. Most of the CSS has also been cleaned up. The previous version of the site used jQuery. (Yeah.) That’s gone. In fact, most of the size of the previous website was the unneeded JavaScript.

I was also able to shave off some KBs by using the Latin1-only variants of my webfonts (no special characters needed, as far as I know).

Of course, I don’t use any tracking or analytics for my website so those scripts don’t weigh down the site either.