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Bonjour!

·2 mins·

Hello there! 👋

Welcome to this new blog/website and this time in English!

Since 2015 and even before, I always managed a blog in French. Today, I wanted to target a wider audience, more international to share my projects, my creations and my discoveries.

I plan with this blog to share English version of posts that I will publish in the future in my french blog and content not intended to be in my french blog.

My french blog runs on Ghost CMS and it’s hosted on a bare-metal server, behind the Cloudflare network. With this one, I wanted a different approach.

First, it’s built with Hugo, a static website generator. For the styling, I found a theme called noteworthy and made few improvements:

  • I updated few colors and implement a light/dark theme switcher
  • I removed Google Analytics, Disqus and implemented Umami for having few analytics
  • I implemented Article rich results for search engines, Opengraph, Twitter cards for sharing and made few improvements for the SEO
  • I implemented a way to link to an alternate version of a post (to a post available in French) and add the associated link rel=alternate for crawlers
  • I use as maximum as possible system fonts and used a very lightweight version of the Open Sans font from Font Squirrel that only include the Basic Latin (ASCII chars) subset. The WOFF2 file only weight 10KB!! 😱

With those improvements, the website weight less than 50KB uncompressed or 35KB gzipped! In terms of performances for Google Lighthouse, it’s a 💯!

Lighthouse performances results

One of the goals I had in mind on making those improvements was to have a very bandwidth efficient website tailored for self-hosting. Today the website is hosted in a Gandi Simple Hosting instance, but I would like to self-host it in a near future.

But before self-host this website, I need to figure out how I can expose this website to the legacy internet aka IPv4 or if I simply decide to only expose in IPv6-only.

More improvements are needed to have a very optimized website. For the moment, it will stay like this. I already started and I would like to take more inspiration on the superb project Solar Low Tech Magazine in particular in the way they manage the pictures (dithered colors).

For the moment, that’s it. Hope you already added this website to your RSS readers to see my future posts!

See ya o/