Jan-Lukas Else

Thoughts of an IT expert

Tags: Blog


My new GoBlog-Blog is finally alive 🎉

Published on in ✍️ Posts

I spent months coding and it’s finally time to say “Hello World”!

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Published on in 💬 Micro

I just switched from my Hugo-based webmention storing method (that triggered a site rebuild for every webmention) to Horst Gutmanns’s webmentiond. There are still a few things to improve, but I will try to submit more pull requests, like support for Telegram as a notification service and a few other issues.

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How my blogroll gets generated (now completely automatic!)

Published on in 👨‍💻 Dev
Updated on

Yesterday I teased a new post about how I automated my blogroll generation by writing a Go script and using the Miniflux API. Here it is.

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Blogging in German

Published on in 💭 Thoughts

For those who haven’t noticed, I’m blogging more regularly in German again 🇩🇪, the last days even more often in German than in English. And this although there will be much less people reading these articles. Somehow it is much easier for me to write texts in my mother tongue. The words flow much better and it is much easier for me to express my thoughts. I will probably write more about my life and stuff like that on my German blog, while my English blog will be more about technical topics. Some things, like my monthly reviews (the next one will be this week) I will also publish in both languages.

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Costs to run this blog

Published on in ✍️ Posts

Kev Quirk and Horst Gutmann recently wrote about how much it cost them to run their blogs. So I thought, I could write about it too.

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🤩 Emojis 🤩

Published on in 💬 Micro

I stumbled over Twemoji by Twitter 🐦 and a Hugo module for Twemoji and thought it might be a good idea to use Twemoji on my blog (I didn’t use the Hugo module, but integrated it directly into my theme - with a few optimizations). In my Flatpak Firefox on Ubuntu most emojis don’t have a color and it isn’t really fun to use emojis in my blog posts when they don’t look great everywhere. Twemoji replaces the Unicode emojis in the browser with SVG images. So if you have JavaScript enabled in your browser, you’ll see emojis that look like on Twitter, otherwise you’ll see the default Unicode emojis from your operating system. So expect an increased use of emojis here. 🤓😂

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How I curate links for my blog

Published on in ✍️ Posts

On my blog there is a section called “Links” (recently not only in English but also in German). But how do I find links that I find interesting and worth sharing? In this post I will describe my process.

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Published on in 💬 Micro

Yesterday evening I hinted that I will give my blog a new design in the next days. I woke up relatively early today and thought that I could just finish it quickly now.

My goals were on the one hand to simplify the design significantly, but on the other hand to save as much HTML and CSS as possible.

Now the page should load even faster than it did before. Almost every page on this blog (except the ones with images) uses less than 10 KB for transfer. All generated files of the blog now only need about 30 MB instead of 60 MB.

Did I succeed?

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Published on in 💬 Micro
Updated on

To give readers a bit more context, I’ve extended my Hugo theme so that it will be displayed below each post if it is mentioned or linked in another post on my blog. This increases the build time from about 7 to about 17 seconds (on my machine it takes 2 seconds, but it is also much faster than the VPS), but I don’t know how I can make it more performant. After all, for each article it is necessary to iterate through all the other articles and see if the content contains a relative link to the post.

Update: I disabled this again, because I don’t like this much increased build time.

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My blog is now faster

Published on in 💬 Micro

Yesterday and today I worked very hard on making my blog faster. In the Google Search Console I saw that my blog suddenly gets half as many clicks since a few days and that my pages are only “moderately” fast. I don’t really care about the number of clicks, but I do want the site to be fast. PageSpeed Insights also showed me that the time until the “First Contentful Paint” seems to be longer than a second for many users (and it has to be under a second for it to be considered fast).

I have taken the following measures:

  • Optimized HTML and CSS
  • Embedded CSS in HTML to reduce the critical path and the number of requests
  • Reduced the CNAME chain
  • Enabled the BunnyCDN Origin Shield (this probably has the greatest effect - especially for requests from the other side of the world)

With Fast or Slow my blog now reaches 100% in every category. Hopefully Google will soon notice that the site is now much faster.

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Jan-Lukas Else