Merged Websites

Most content from my previous blog website “metzlog” now got merged into www.srcbox.net. Maintaining two websites using two different static site generators (Jekyll and Hugo) felt like too much effort and the few posts about software releases and smaller admin tasks should fit in here just fine.

Content changes

The srcbox site started changing at the beginning of December already when I moved all my past projects to be available on the Projects page instead of hiding them in an unlinked projects subdirectory of the old blog.

I also took the opportunity and turned some of existing pages into markdown format to make them easier to edit and simplified pages like GKrellM Downloads for future updates.

Finally I also took care of a bunch of dead links (which reminds me to get my own redirects working properly).

Simpler analytics

The website analytics software used to get some basic overview over downloads and site navigation got an overhaul as well. I’m now using a self-host instance of GoatCounter instead of Matomo which I also self-hosted but which (again) broke during the last upgrade in early 2020.

Technical improvements

As part of this move I learnt quite a bit more about Hugo. Reading up on Hugo templates led to less layout files and more content being written in Markdown instead of raw HTML.

Bulma, the CSS framework I chose for srcbox.net got upgraded to version 0.9.1, also dumping a few unused parts of it along the way in order to trim down the CSS rules (I don’t think a 10kb HTML page should require a 100kb CSS file).

Other parts like CSS compression and purging via PostCSS as well as delivery of precompressed content via nginx gzip_static should result in smaller CSS and HTML files and thus faster page load times.

Open tasks

A few parts of “metzlog” did not make it yet. At least for now, post comments are missing. I have to manually migrate the existing comments to also work for the new location.

Another feature that got lost is the Atom feed for posts but I have a somewhat working version running locally already and only have to settle on where to integrate it. The old feed URL should soon redirecting to the new location

Update 2020-12-29: The Posts Atom Feed is available again.