Aureola: Update 2022

Everything is new in May. Ok, by now it's June. Nevertheless, I spent the whole of May giving this website a long-needed makeover. Not only did I give the site a little facelift, I also replaced the content management system. Additionally there were a lot of smaller and bigger improvements. Which ones exactly, you can learn in the article.

I have also always seen this blog as an opportunity to try out new things. You just learn better on a concrete project. Tutorials rarely go into depth. Since I switched professionally to Laravel as a framework some time ago, I wanted to update this blog accordingly. However, I also wanted to have a convenient way to manage the site. The choice fell on Statamic.

Statamic is a file-based content management system. So basically relatively similar to Grav (the previous system). The CMS can be integrated into any existing Laravel application. The basic version is free of charge. Especially nice is the well structured user interface and the deployment friendly storage of the content. Through the CMS I could implement some features that I had in mind for quite a long time.

• New comments feature: For quite some time I have been using the paid comment system Hyvor Talk. With Statamic I could now implement my own commenting feature. Now I can finally abandon the integration of an external service. This saves money and kilobytes.

• New, old design: I took the opportunity to give the old design a little facelift. I went with the times and now rely on Tailwind instead of self-written CSS in BEM style. Therefore the redesign went easy and smooth.

• About me: Have you always wanted to know something about me personally? No? Oh. Well, now you have the opportunity to do so. There is now an about page including a resume and a little introduction.

• Contact me: Thanks to Statamic I was finally able to integrate a small contact form into the site. There you have the opportunity to, well, contact me. In addition, you will find links to all my social media profiles, which are sometimes more and sometimes less well maintained.

• Instagram: Complementary to my social media appearances, I have integrated the latest posts of my Instagram profile into the website. On the home page you will now always find the 4 most recent pictures of my Instagram profile.

• Share links: With each article you will now also find a few handy share links. So if you want to tell someone about this blog, nothing stands in the way.

• highlight.php: Did you know that there is a PHP port of highlight.js? Fact. When I discovered this by accident, I immediately threw out the way too big javascript library. Server-side preprocessing now takes its place.

• Responsive Images: As announced some time ago, I finally wanted to be able to use adaptive sized images. With the help of Glide and the Responsive Images Addon from Spatie, this was no problem at all. With static cache enabled, the images are even pre-generated on deployment.

• Lazy Loading: All images are now only loaded if they are visible. The loading attribute has been around for some time in HTML5 for this.

• Embedded Icons: I had also embedded icons on my todo list for a long time. All icons are now displayed together with the HTML markup. The icons themselves are still from Icomoon.

• JSON-LD: Structured data has been part of this blog for a while. However, I had previously relied on Microdata. Now all data is delivered collected as JSON-LD. I have been told that this is more common practice.

Some time ago I showed in an article series how I optimized my website. But what does the performance of the site look like now? I have measured this on the basis of the two articles from that time. We stopped at 233 ms response time and a size of 392 kb for article 1. With the redesign we are now at 186 ms and 307 kb. Article 2 was loaded in 213 ms back then and covers 272 kb. Now the response time is 159 ms with a size of 269 kb. So there was again a small improvement. I think we are moving towards sizes where the bottleneck will be at some point rather at the DNS server. So I consider the optimization finished for the time being.

Personally, I am very happy about the redesign and am thrilled with the new CMS. This has made writing new articles much easier for me. I already have a few of those in the pipeline. So we will hear from each other again soon. Until then, farewell.