Website Optimization Measures, Part XXVIII

Published on November 29, 2024, filed under Development (RSS feed for all categories).

Welcome to a new episode of “Website Optimization Measures,” a casual series in which—in case this is the first edition you run into—I share improvements and lessons from the work on my personal projects, allowing you to pick what you think could benefit yours:

1. Refactoring all medium.com links to use archive.today versions. For monetization, Medium employs bait and switch ^* to first show content, then paywall it. On Frontend Dogma, this is a problem, because it breaks with the user expectation of navigating to the (full) content in question. Months ago, I’ve started only to link to an archived and therefore stable version of Medium articles. In this optimization step, I did the same for all remaining Medium articles, so to ensure a consistent user experience.

   (This isn’t criticism of or action against Medium—selling content is a tough business, and they made a conscious decision to employ this tactic for their users’ content. It just needs reconciliation with the interests of other users, like those of Frontend Dogma, where this compromise looks better than avoiding Medium and their creators altogether.)

2. Testing -webkit-font-smoothing: antialiased. David Bushell’s write-up had me add this to my projects.

3. Simplifying Eleventy templates. I’m not sure where I picked this up, because it isn’t from the Eleventy base blog that I had based some of my Eleventy sites on. But, I somewhat accidentally noticed that I had this “default.njk” template that only did one thing, passing content through to the underlying “base.njk” template. Which every other template could just reference directly. Dudjdkdkdajjad.

4. Updating Bluesky social handles to use the domain name. Not quite a website optimization step, but stumbling upon Jim Nielsen’s Setting Your Social Handle as Your Domain Name on Bluesky, I bit the bullet and updated all my Bluesky accounts to use the domain name instead. I find that cleaner. For me personally, for example, find me at bsky.app/profile/meiert.com now.

5. Improving Bluesky integration. Furthermore, on Frontend Dogma, I’ve implemented support for Bluesky attribution. This means that I opened the site also to Bluesky, after previously, author and publisher infos could only handle Mastodon and Twitter/X. The integration was a lot of (AI-assisted) work but allowed to further demote Twitter/X. While Frontend Dogma has always been Mastodon-first, it’s now Bluesky-second, and Twitter/X-last, with me working on when and how I end support for the latter. (It increasingly feels like a Truth Social clone, though I’ve never set foot on that platform.)

6. Semi-automating Frontend Dogma post selection. This was huge for me, and something I wouldn’t have thought realistic months ago. However, building the muscle to use AI for process simplification and automation, I just tried GitHub Copilot to help me with my fairly manual process to, 2–4 times a day, select the next posts to publish on Frontend Dogma. Not only did Copilot give me something that picked posts as spaced out as I usually prefer, it also helped make sure the topics are mixed. A fantastic improvement.

7. Standardizing title quotation marks—is how JetBrains’ AI Assistant titled the commit message, elaborating: “Updated various page titles instead of to use consistent double quotes for improved readability and standardization across the site. This change affects multiple Markdown and [Nunjucks] files to ensure uniformity in title styling.” Indeed I had often worked with quote-less titles in Eleventy front matter (title: Title, instead of title: "Title"); but as sometimes, quoting is necessary, I’ve been moving to quoting all title fields.

8. Updating Twitter/X links. I had thought I had done this at some point, but with the change to “X,” links to twitter.com really should go to x.com now, and I had surprisingly many references left that still pointed to twitter.com.

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

^* An “asymmetric bait and switch,” I suppose, given that Medium shows full versions to some visitors, “baiting” to point to the article in question, and doing the switch when other visitors access the article later, to convert them into pay users.

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 a contributor to several web standards, 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. (Please be critical, interpret charitably, and give feedback.)