Website Optimization Measures, Part XIV

Published on Jul 21, 2022 (updated Oct 20, 2024), filed under development, design, optimization (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

Eight quick improvements on my own sites, accrued over the last couple of months, for inspiration and critique.

1. Documenting more link relationships. Shortly after this series’ March update, I (finally?) added rel=canonical metadata to posts that I had originally posted elsewhere, to indicate where the original was living. I also added select additional link elements, to speed up connection to resources likely to be accessed (like Frontend Dogma’s Twitter account, which is central to the site’s purpose).

2. Allowing Twitterbot access to otherwise “disallowed” pages. With meiert.com overview pages I realized that there have been pages I wanted excluded from being indexed, but not excluded from being properly shown on Twitter. Accordingly, I made some adjustments to this site’s robots.txt—and should probably look into whether there are similar use cases on other sites.

3. Adding (proper) dark mode. I had been playing with super-short dark mode solutions; alas, they didn’t work as well as I liked them to, yet. For some reason I felt Frontend Dogma was a candidate to implement not the “a-little-darker mode” I’ve set up for meiert.com and uitest.com, but a full dark mode. That’s what I did.

4. Reviewing tags. As Frontend Dogma has been growing (currently at 1,717 posts, and 667 followers!), managing and maintaining the various tags has become a greater challenge. As such, every other week I end up adding, editing, and cleaning up tags. This work seems important on a site like Frontend Dogma, because it’s where one key benefit lies. Just look at, say, all the accessibility news—or, for contrast, what’s up with micro-frontends.

5. Updating personal addresses. Okay, clearly you have to do this when you’re moving and you’re based in a country that requires you to publish your residential coordinates. Done, when we moved last month.

6. Reviewing and optimizing social markup. First, check my tweet from that evening. Then—have a look at my post on “minimal social markup.” The minimum markup isn’t as minimal as HTML would allow it—but it’s still more minimal than what I used to work with up until now.

7. Playing with the color-scheme property. I wasn’t aware of the property until a tweet by Chris Heilmann; and although I didn’t find it mission-critical, I added it to the Frontend Dogma style sheets. Maybe followed by more, once I roll out full dark modes in other projects.

8. Removing FLoC-related policies. When Google proposed FLoC, I had concerns about it, too, and quickly removed it. But FLoC is dead, and therefore the corresponding one-liners could also be removed.

This is a part of an open article series. Check out some of the other optimization posts!

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a web developer, manager, and author. I’ve been working as a technical lead and engineering manager for companies you’ve never heard of and companies you use every day, I’m an occasional contributor to web standards (like HTML, CSS, WCAG), and I write and review books for O’Reilly and Frontend Dogma.

I love trying things, not only in web development and engineering management, but also in other areas like philosophy. Here on meiert.com I share some of my experiences and views. (I value you being critical, interpreting charitably, and giving feedback.)