October 22, 2024 [Writing]

As you might notice, I have just improved my blog from WordPress to Zola. This means that my home computer does the work of rendering pages to HTML once, and my web server only needs to give HTML given to your browser. This must mean the pages appear faster on your screen, and maybe less energy used in the process. I also took the opportunity to make the page less messy and more focused on the content of the article.

So if you allow me a little pleasure, I want to see the history of this blog again.

Technology changes over time

I started writing a blog in 2005, wanting to talk about more free/open source jobs, especially my TV guide to FEGUIDE (still strong). My approach is RSS-FIRST: I wrote the XML RSS file hand, and wrote some simple python code to produce an HTML website from RSS, and then I uploaded it all to the free web room given to my internet service provider.

In 2007 I moved to WordPress because I wanted to be able to write a blog post while traveling, and that allowed me to type it to a web form even if I was on the train or at work. I was trapped with WordPress for a long time – it gave me the flexibility I needed, and I did not want to break the existing URL.

When the blog becomes more popular, I make a gradual change to try to speed up its performance – I update to the virtual server from the web space together, and then pay more for a stronger server. I installed various caching plugins, working to reduce the inherent overhead of PHP -based systems such as WordPress that built your pages when they fly whenever they were asked.

The next significant technological change was 16 years later, when I installed the WordPress plugin to allow directly to follow the blog through Fediverse.

Statistics

Some statistics for you:

• 19 years of blogging so far
• 517 blog posts
• 140 Images and Videos
• 150 people follow the comments of comments via email (sorry, missing in the transition, but you can re -signate a new system based on comment42)
• 4 people followed through Fediverse (sorry, I lost this in the transition! Please follow @andybalaam @mastodon.social)
• 655 comments
• 176,945 Spam comments are blocked, according to Akismet
• 7,637 IP which was blocked by the Limit Login Efforts plugin
• 378K Total visitors since I switched to Koto Analytics in 2020
• Peak Traffic: ~ 15K Display/Month (2016-2020, when my YouTube video gets more appearance)
• Current Traffic: ~ 3K Display/Month
• Time to build Zola: 13s

Highlights

Transition

I was determined to keep the URL as much as possible URL, and one of the Zola attractions was the fact that I could control the POS URL exactly as I wanted.

I really need to write a few codes to make it happen.

Here are some homework that makes me here:

with some will still come.

Enjoy the next 19 years

I hope this new format is fun for you. I am quite sure the page will load faster, which should make life a little better when you land on one of my pages.

Do it relate and tell me your opinion! You can leave the comments below, ping me on mastodon @andybalaam @mastodon.social or join my matrix room #andybalaam: matrix.org.

Or, exactly anything in the last 19 years, just follow the RSS bait!