Yesterday and today I worked very hard on making my blog faster. In the Google Search Console I saw that my blog suddenly gets half as many clicks since a few days and that my pages are only “moderately” fast. I don’t really care about the number of clicks, but I do want the site to be fast. PageSpeed Insights also showed me that the time until the “First Contentful Paint” seems to be longer than a second for many users (and it has to be under a second for it to be considered fast).

I have taken the following measures:

• Optimized HTML and CSS
• Embedded CSS in HTML to reduce the critical path and the number of requests
• Reduced the CNAME chain
• Enabled the BunnyCDN Origin Shield (this probably has the greatest effect - especially for requests from the other side of the world)

With Fast or Slow my blog now reaches 100% in every category. Hopefully Google will soon notice that the site is now much faster.

I’m not really a TikTok user, but I have discovered a few accounts that are worth following. Since I don’t want to install TikTok under any circumstances and I don’t want to visit the website manually, I built myself a TikTok JSON Feed generator. This tool consists of only a few lines of JavaScript and uses the library tiktok-scraper. Now I can follow TikTok-ers and see new posts in Miniflux. I hope that TikTok will not block my server.

I just upgraded my webserver from Caddy 1 to Caddy 2. It was not so easy to adapt my partly more complex configuration, but in the end I succeeded. I especially like the simplicity of adding plugins to the new version. There is also finally an official Docker Image. Also it is now finally possible to use regular expressions for redirects and rewrites. The new handler syntax is great.

They’re probably happy cows. 🐄🐮

Inspired by the posts of Kev Quirk and Jake Bauer, I did a Lighthouse test of my website. I wanted to see how good my blog is SEO wise. Some shortcomings were pointed out to me, for example I forgot to add rel="noopener" to external links with target="_blank" and in the mobile view some “tap targets” were too close together, so you could have clicked on the wrong one. I have addressed the problems and improved a few things in my theme. I don’t care that much about SEO, but somehow it’s nicer when Lighthouse confirms that you follow all the best practices, it’s the ambition. There are still a few things I could improve on, but I think then there is never an end.

To do a Lighthouse test, you can either use the “Audits” tab in Chromium-based browsers, or this bookmarklet in Firefox:

javascript:void(document.location='https://googlechrome.github.io/lighthouse/viewer/?psiurl='+escape(document.location)+'&strategy=mobile&category=performance&category=accessibility&category=best-practices&category=seo')

I probably shouldn’t be posting articles at 11:30 at night. Somehow it happens to me too often that I make a mistake while publishing, like missing the title, posting in the wrong category on my blog or something similar. Go to sleep and don’t blog so late, Jan-Lukas!

While in the beginning I integrated almost everything directly into my hugo-micropub tool, I now build separate tools for new features that can be used independently (like this one or this). Most of them simply use the JSON Feed as a kind of API to get information about published articles. Not real microservices, but it goes in that direction.

Fortunately I have a pretty high traffic limit, which I would never reach with my VPS at Hetzner Cloud, but BunnyCDN now offers a new feature called “Origin Shield”, which can help to significantly reduce traffic to your own server by adding a second cache layer between edge server and the origin. Nice! 👍

It gets worse and worse… My spam folder collects more and more emails from some Chinese spammers who want to sell me masks against corona. No thanks, I’m not interested.

After reading this tutorial about how to mirror a Gitea repository to other Git hosting services like GitHub, I decided to follow a new strategy regarding my projects. I will use my main Gitea instance for all my public repositories and then mirror them on Codeberg and GitHub. I will also migrate projects from GitHub and Codeberg to my Gitea instance and replace the repos with mirrors.

This method gives me full control over my projects and I can create new mirrors or remove old mirrors at any time and I am not dependent on any service.