Everything Old is New Again
Intro
Every so often, it's good to reassess one's position. This is good from both a standpoint of being inquisitive and even interrogative, but when it comes to the ever changing landscape of the front-end development space, it's not only inevitable, but must be embraced for what feels the need to "stay afloat". I'm changing theme of my blog, hopefully for the better. The previous theme was good and did a great job of getting things started, but while I had forked a copy of a good source theme, I wound up tinkering a fair amount and giving it quite a few customizations. Over time, things grew and I found myself spending some time on the side trying to optimize the blog performance.
Why?
The largest reasons for the change in blog theme are for:
- performance
- readability
- the fun of it
The new theme I've adopted (and customized a fair amount already), amplify for Jekyll, is highly performant and makes use of the AMP Project (Accelerated Mobile Pages). This wasn't what I set out to do, but I was looking for a fast, elegant, and lightweight delivery for modern content, with a high focus on mobile-first design. I believe the amplify theme achieves this, and the AMP components are surprisingly quite decent to work with. I'm still toying with a few things and making them more "AMP normal", but for the most part, my page should even be able to load via the Google AMP CDN for some pretty darned fast load times. The constraints set by the AMP Project also mean that the forced structure of the components should mean it will load quite fast, regardless, which is a good thing.
This isn't born purely of a desire to have an even higher PageSpeed Insights ranking, but I have managed to settle on a theme that looks and reads well, focuses on the content, and eliminates a lot of the bloat of some of the jQuery driven effects that were really just window dressing.
Future
I've got a couple of things cooking in the development space, this is merely a pit stop along the way. Until next time, 🍻
