19 years of blogging

October 22, 2024 [Writing]

As you may have noticed, I recently upgraded my blog from WordPress to Zola. This means that my home computer does the work of rendering the pages to HTML once, and my web server only has to provide the rendered HTML to your browser. This should mean the pages appear much faster on your screen, and probably less energy is used in the process. I've also taken the opportunity to make the pages less cluttered and more focussed on the article content.

So if you'll allow me a little self-indulgence, I'd like to look back over the history of this blog.

Technology changes over time

I started blogging in 2005, wanting to talk about more free/open source work, especially my TV guide FreeGuide (still going strong). My approach was RSS-first: I hand-wrote the RSS XML files, and wrote some simple Python code to generate an HTML web site from the RSS, and then I uploaded all of it to the free web space provided to my by my Internet Service Provider.

In 2007 I moved to WordPress because I wanted to be able to write blog posts while on the move, and it allowed me to type them in to a web form even if I was on the train or at work. I stuck with WordPress for a long time - it gave me the flexibility I needed, and I didn't want to break existing URLs.

As the blog became more popular, I made gradual changes to try to speed up its performance - I upgraded to a virtual server from shared web space, and later paid more for a more powerful server. I installed various caching plugins, working to reduce the inherent overhead of a PHP-based system like WordPress that constructs your pages on-the-fly whenever they are requested.

The next significant technology change was 16 years later, when I installed a WordPress plugin to allow directly following the blog via the fediverse.

Statistics

Some stats for you:

Views over time for this blog: starts high in 2020, and drops off, stabilising at about 2K views/month

Highlights

The transition

I was determined to keep as many URLs working as possible, and one of the attractions of Zola was the fact that I could control the post URLs exactly as I wanted.

I did need to write some code to make it happen.

Here are some of the PRs that got me here:

with quite a few still to come.

Enjoy the next 19 years

I hope the new format is pleasing to you. I'm fairly sure the pages will load quicker, which should make life a tiny bit nicer when you land on one of my pages.

Do get in touch and let me know what you think! You can leave a comment below, ping me on Mastodon @andybalaam@mastodon.social or join my Matrix room #andybalaam:matrix.org.

Or, exactly like any time in the last 19 years, just follow the RSS feed!