HayoBethlehem.nl V15
This year i'm doing things a little different; I'm downsizing the website.
Since 2014 I've been dabbling in WordPress. And every year it has become more a stomach ache, and less a tool to make my life better. First there was Gutenberg. Then there was the enormously bloaty way of creating plugins. Then the template engine got worse. And every time the bloat increased, nothing was done to facilite higher performance, except even more plugins that function like outboard motors on an oil tanker. When Matt Mullenweg went insane and started suing companies for being his competitor, it became clear to me that Wordpress has become a dead end.
Most code and plugins I used in WordPress was to make WordPress work better. In retrospect this is incredibly silly and most defininitely a waste of time. But seriously, think about it. a 30mb website platform, needing 2mb plugins for caching, so the system doesn't collapse when more than 5 people at a time visit you website?
Enshittification, also known as crapification and platform decay, is a pattern in which two-sided online products and services decline in quality over time. Initially, vendors create high-quality offerings to attract users, then they degrade those offerings to better serve business customers, and finally degrade their services to users and business customers to maximize profits for shareholders.
Sounds familiar. So, now what? I tried finding an alterative CMS, only to find out most are as bloated as WordPress, or unusable in other ways. The diverse ecosystem that existed in 2010 is gone. Time for some introspection.
Solutions
I went back to basics. No more CMS. The website is now plain text, and uses some tiny scripts as scaffolding. There's a central parser/router file, that caches the content, and rescales images . Metadata from images is read to supply captions. This whole system is no more than 7kb of code.
Another thing I stripped out is every piece of unnecessary metadata. No more open graph tags for incorrect standards from social media. No more meta descriptions as noone uses them. Also no more tracking scripts; as honestly for this website, I just really don't care who comes here and how.
The whole thing is managed from Gitlab, with a pipeline that clears the cache when I have updates.
So this leaves me with a much simpler website, on a much more robust foundation. There are no external dependencies any more. Sure, I still use gitlab, but that's just a quality of life thing. I don't really need it. It also allows me to experiment with technology, without making the core site slower.
