The New Blog
2026-06-20
PA
Warning: This blog entry is a lot of technical mumbo-jumbo about the blog itself. Some of you will be interested. Everyone else, thanks for stopping and please hit the "next" button!
You may have noticed the new blog location and format. When I started this, I wasn't sure if I would keep it up past the first few days, so I used a free service (wix.com). At the time, that was the best choice for a free blog, and they have decent tools. However, my pictures eventually exceeded the free storage limit (almost as if they planned it) so I'm paying $216/year, which is a lot for something no one reads. Furthermore, I wanted a bit more control, and I was looking for a way to create the posts without the internet.
So I looked into static site generators and found something called makesite which is a really simple python script. I'm much more familiar with python than javascript and jinja (e.g. eleventy), thus it was easier for me to customize it to exactly what I wanted as compared to a script that is able to do everything. For example, I post a lot of pictures (probably the only thing most people look at), and I wanted to make them links to the larger versions and add captions. I could have done that with four lines of embedded html for each image, but it would require me to repeat both the filename and caption in there twice which is prone to errors. So I created my own tag and added the code to makesite to handle it. Now I just have to write one line with the filename and caption, and each image appears as I want it to. I also added Previous and Next buttons on each article (I really don't know why that isn't considered a minimum for a blog).
As I moved all the pages over, it ended up being 165 pages to date with just over 1 GB in 1030 images. That's about 6 images per page on average. Each image file is around 1 MB, with a few being bigger, as big as 5 MB for some phone images. From Capture One I controlled the size and quality so most of the images are less than 1 MB per image, using 1400 pixels for the long edge, resolution of 300 px/in, and an 85% quality. Lightroom had a way to cap the file size which I liked, although I'm not sure which parameters it would drop if the file was too big.
I've switched to a much newer image processing program since my first trip. I was running Lightroom 5.7.1 which was released Dec. 2014. It was the last version that you could get with a perpetual license, and I never wanted to pay monthly. Regardless, you need a processing program when working with RAW images to save them to JPEG at the very least, and I did some processing in Lightroom as well. Since then I moved to Capture One which has a perpetual license. It also has a few new tools to help with editing; apparently software has improved in the past 12 years. Since I didn't have my original exported JPEGs for anything previous to 2022, I re-exported from the originals doing fresh edits to the pictures. I think they came out better. I also ended up doing 2022-2024 because I wasn't happy with how they looked. It took a while; probably tens of hours, but then I'm retired. There were also a few phone pics that I can't find, and for those I just copied the images from the Wix site. I also read and edited the text, although I'm sure I missed some of the same stuff that I missed the first time.
Because of all the articles, I split the blog listing into years. Loading 165+ images at 1 MB would be 165 MB (and growing) and at some point that's going to be a lot of bytes to download. I know the internet is fast, but that's a bunch of bytes. I don't want my handful of readers to be put off by slow load times. Each year is maybe 25 entries. And I added the "previous year" and "next year" buttons (programmatically, of course) so it's easy to navigate. It's not as nice as the infinite scroll that is common these days, but that requires a bunch of stuff like databases that I don't want to maintain. I'd say think of it as exercising your clicking finger. You'll be in shape to get those Taylor Swift tickets!
The HTML file size is a big improvement. I looked at one page in Wix and it totaled 840 kB (excluding images). The same page in the SSG HTML (which is light and simple) was only 3 kB. That's 99.6% smaller. Why is the other site so big? I used "View Page Source" and I honestly don't know what most of the extra code does. Sure, there is some to handle infinite scroll and show that it's a three minute read, but there was a lot of telemetry, javascript, and font stuff. It hits the server a lot more times too. Maybe I'll find I need some of this over time; for now my entire site's worth of html files is less than 2 MB and pages load nearly instantly.
One additional benefit of the SSG is that I get to create the page and display it on my computer without needing the internet. The previous site required me to work in a browser on the Wix site to create an entry. Now I can just create a text file, type my thoughts, and add pictures. I serve it on my box so I can see the result. Once it's ready I commit it to my local git repo. Since the repo exceeds 1 GB it's backed up with my HDD and not on github. At any rate, when I'm on the internet again, I just push the site to Cloudflare, which is smart enough to only transfer the files that have changed. I think this will really appeal to me when I'm in a tent.
Also, this approach is cheaper. Cloudflare is free for up to 100k hits a month. I don't think that even with bots that my site will reach that. Remember, there are anywhere from 5 to 60 people that have read a given post, and I'm probably two or three of them. So it's about $200 less per year, although it still costs something because I bought the domain name "chuckkir.com" which is $10/year. I'm sure everyone is as surprised as I am that my fan club hadn't purchased it yet.
The thing that I lost was page view statistics. I will no longer be able to say how many people have read a post. Maybe I'll figure a way to add that in the future, but I feel that the options are either to link to a third-party web page like Statcounter to do the counting or just live without. Pretty sure it will be the latter.
I'd love to hear any ideas for improvements.
