At the beginning of the month, loading a regular article set off this chain of requests:
First, Font Awesome, which was used to render two
useless icons in the footer, has been removed and the footer simplified. Second,
the CSS file for syntax highlighting is now served with main.css to reduce the
number of requests. Finally, jQuery and a number of things I’m not using were
removed.
After the overhaul, we get a much better picture:
I’m thinking either one of Lusitana or Inconsolata has got to go, because it’s unconscionable to transmit tens of kilobytes halfway across the world just to render my OOP vs. FP drivel and Lisp rants with pretentious hipster serifs.
Additionally, the State of the Common Lisp Ecosystem article, which formerly had its own set of CSS files and some JS code for generating graphs, was completely overhauled. It’s now a perfectly ordinary article with a little bit of CSS at the end to style the boxes with recommendations. The article-specific assets were removed for two reasons:
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Article-specific CSS was a set of overrides over default website and article style, so it was untenable to update it as the general website style is updated.
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Article-specific JS was used for two purposes: rendering some article-specific style that couldn’t be done with bare CSS (now unnecessary, because the custom style was removed), and rendering the plots. I had occasional reports of the plots not working on certain combinations of browser and User-Agent, so I simply took screenshots of those and inserted them into the post. No client-side rendering needed.
And finally, I removed Google Analytics. It wasn’t useful for day-to-day operation, I hardly ever checked it, and there’s no justification for adding yet another eye to the panopticon just so I can look at a chart every few months.
Next up, probably: fixing the glaring lack of TLS.