Website Optimization Measures, Part XXVI

Published on September 19, 2024, filed under Development (RSS feed for all categories).

Hello and welcome to episode 26 of a series that started in 2008 and that I use to share random improvements and lessons from the work on my personal projects so that you can—let me make this one sentence—pick what you think may benefit yours. Web design is a process!

1. Quitting the Google docs viewer (example). I have used this thing forever, to point to PDFs and other office-type docs, and to improve the user experience at times when browsers might have opened another app, or prompted a download, or did other things. Nowadays, however, any browser I tested would readily show the respective document and make it easy to navigate back—while the Google viewer was oddly unreliable, sometimes requiring a few (!) clicks to even be navigated to (I never investigated that behavior). Well. Bye. (I still mention if a link goes to a PDF or such though—better information scent.)

2. Reviewing dependency management. I’m a huge fan of Depfu, and I’ve gotten used to Dependabot. Alas, so far I’m using a free plan of Depfu, which doesn’t include private repos. Although I don’t like the double setup, what I’ve opted to do now is to make sure every Node project is set up with Dependabot (to guarantee that each project’s dependencies are managed), and to add Depfu to public repositories. The double setup (and the possible noise related to it) I’m addressing by using a weekly Dependabot schedule in private projects, and a monthly one in public projects (where Depfu is handling the main load). I’m not annoyed, and think it works well!

3. Revising handling of English terms in Germany copy. Oh swearword is this a swearword—I’m probably giving up on trying to make this consistent (let alone “perfect”). I’m probably already giving up on a proper explanation! But let’s just say this, especially in German technical writings I use a good number of English terms—and there are a number of (largely inconsequential) ways of marking or not marking these. I’ve worked on improving this but—you can already tell, I’m not happy yet. (And I do have enough German content infused with English terms that this issue sucks.)

4. Setting up Prettier. 😬 Don’t you worry, I’ve known Prettier for ages! But it took me until scanning Matt Pocock’s How to Create an npm Package to finally include it in my overall project setup. Well!

   Speaking of which, I had to tweak options and what to ignore quite a bit, to then be so concerned about Prettier’s opinionated and upheld decision to “close” HTML tags (which leads to useless XHTML–HTML bloat), that I’ve disabled Prettier for HTML, and am monitoring whether using it does indeed make sense.

5. Kicking Prettier. After familiarizing myself with Prettier’s options and opinions, I discovered more decisions I don’t agree with and that I don’t want in my code base (like EOF new lines)—and decided it was not worth it. Good bye 🫡

6. Tagging AWS resources. As part of testing and playing around with AWS (cf. Notes on Setting Up a Static Website With AWS), I started tagging resources. I’ve been keeping this simple, just tagging by domain name, and it’s all early, but, we’ll see.

7. Adjusting bot crawl delays. Ages ago, I limited Majestic’s MJ12bot’s crawl delay on meiert.com. Reviewing robots.txt files and hits from this and related bots, I decided to include Semrush’s bot in the mix, too, and set the following rules in all my major websites. To be observed and tweaked further.

   User-agent: MJ12bot
   User-agent: SemrushBot
   Crawl-delay: 15

8. Optimizing Eleventy configuration and performance. Keeping this vague—still testing—, I used AI to question and optimize some of my .eleventy.js customizations. Some of this related to if/else constructs, too. I believe I could shave off ø 10% export time for Frontend Dogma, for example, but—I’m still testing.

9. Quitting DreamHost. I’ve been a DreamHost customer and fan since 2006. I can’t say I’ve grown unhappy, but I’ve definitely fallen out of love over time. The first time I noticed this was a couple of years back, when DreamHost force-upgraded my hosting to a PHP version some tooling I was using didn’t support, then telling me to pay their premium support to get it patched—which, feeling pressured but not to be blackmailed, led to me pulling the plug on said tooling (!). (This was the first time that a hosting provider forced their will on me, and it probably cost them the business relationship.) More recently, I noticed how much more expensive DreamHost was than my German provider, ALL-INKL, as well as AWS, which I use as well. I’ve taken care of the bulk of the work to close my DreamHost account, to complete the rest over the next few months.

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

About Me

I’m Jens (long: Jens Oliver Meiert), and I’m a frontend engineering leader and tech author/publisher. I’ve worked as a technical lead for companies like Google and as an engineering manager for companies like Miro, I’m somewhat close to W3C and WHATWG, 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 views and experiences.

If you’d like to do me a favor, interpret charitably (I speak three languages, and they do collide), yet be critical and give feedback, so that I can make improvements. Thank you!