Website Optimization Measures, Part XXXI

Published on May 8, 2025, filed under development (feed). (Share this on Mastodon or Bluesky?)

Welcome to another episode of “WOM,” where I share improvements and lessons from the work on my own projects, enabling you to pick what you think could benefit yours:

1. Making more use of Qodana. A long-time IntelliJ and WebStorm user, I’ve some time ago started to play with Qodana for static code analysis, and even fine-tuned its configuration. But—I never automated any of it. This I still haven’t, but I ran a few local tests, which were useful in order to optimize some code in my projects.

2. Switching from html-minifier to html-minifier-terser. In my mind, Juriy Zaytsev’s html-minifier is critical web tooling. Hands-down the best tool for minimal HTML. (Check my config!) But—html-minifier isn’t being maintained anymore. After keeping my hopes up for a few years, I briefly thought about forking and emergency-maintaining the project myself… until I ran into html-minifier-terser. Now—that project, too, seems to approach being unmaintained, and I’m still waiting for feedback from who seems to be the maintainer, but… right now, I use html-minifier-terser.

3. Making some public email changes. Curiously working through Janet Vertesi’s “Opt Out Project,” I made several privacy-related adjustments, including rotating some public emails.

4. Cleaning up .gitconfig. Noticing I could enable autoSetupRemote, I found I might as well review my .gitconfig template and the config I had on the machine I was working on. That was useful as that config was out of sync and even included repos I didn’t need on maintenance anymore.

5. Pushing harder on automation. Alibi entry. Also not about automation in the classical sense. What I refer to here is looking into more optimization options for my homemade tooling to take in content for Frontend Dogma. The latest productivity improvements included automatically filling in any URL in the clipboard, as well as prefilling dates if a reasonable guess could be made. The tool has become pretty magic by now. To me.

6. Optimizing Eleventy exports. I switched to keeping build folders and rsync’ing build and export folders. I’m keeping this short as I made it long elsewhere: How I Run Eleventy.

7. Upgrading to newer GitHub actions. When preparing another Eleventy post, Eleventy: A GitHub Workflow to Check if an Automated Dependency Update Would Break Your Site, a brief check using Cody surfaced that the actions I originally used, “checkout” and “setup-node,” were outdated (v3 instead of v4). I reviewed and updated all actions in all projects as well as posts mentioning them.

8. Improving cron job redirection. For forever, I’ve redirected most cron job output to /dev/null, discarding all output (&>). With one job, this bit me a few times, until I learned—thanks to GitHub Copilot, which I then verified—that redirecting via > would be better, in order to inform about errors. I had no idea, because that would have sounded smart from the start.

9. Migrating… meiert.com! This has to be the final measure featured in this article because, yes, this was about migrating this whole website from an ancient version of WordPress (one of my biggest engineering blunders, made in the 2000s) to Eleventy, including moving all content by means of an AI-built migration tool ✨ I’m both recovering and rejoicing from the effort, so that’s all I’ll share here 😄

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 small and large enterprises, 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.)