Why does my page look so “broken”?

If you’re a first time visitor you might be irritated about the very strage looking layout my site has. Truth is you probably thought, my page is missing something. That is not the case. It’s intentional!

But why?

For the past few years, I had a self-hosted WordPress blog which was good enough. But then, 2019 came around and since then we all talk about climate change and that we should reduce our carbon footprint. And that is all well and good.

But on the other side, my hobby, which involves computers and the Internet, is not so environmentally friendly as you’d think. Truth is, every page loaded, every site visited, every video streamed requires energy. Energy to process, energy to transmit, energy to display. And this energy has to come from somewhere. And every byte that gets transferred uses energy. So why not start with a more simplistic approach. Does a general blog really need megabytes of resources for a simple text post? No!

I made a test and loaded my blogs home page. And my browser reported that 1.91 MB have been trasferred. About 24 requests have been made, of which 6 were CSS files, another 6 JavaScripts, 3 web fonts and 6 images. Granted, these images came from posts that were displayed, but still. So I thought of taking a more “radical” approach to this:

Let’s go back about 20 years and do internet like then!

This blog is now hosted by GitHub using GitHub pages and Jekyll. Pages are based on Markdown pages and get render through a minimalist HTML template. There are no other external dependencies and an average page load takes only a few kilobytes. This has the added benefit that the page loads faster on slow internet connections (Germanys mobile data network sucks outside big cities) and it should also be very accessible.

But how do I … here?

… search?

Currently there is no search feature. I’m thinking of ways to implement that but for the moment, you can use your browsers search feature (CTRL+F or CMD+F) to find a post in the index.

… comment?

There is no comment feature and that is also intentional. First, it opens my blog up to spam, scams and other stuff I have to worry about. Second, due to local laws, I might even be liable for stuff other people might post here, and I don’t want that. You can always submit your comment via Twitter, email or a Pull Request on GitHub.

Wrap Up: Why did I do this?

• Save the environment by loading fewer bytes
• Make page load faster
• Make page more accessible
• Reduce hosting costs
• Reduce possible liability