My first Blog Link to heading
After browsing the internet for 25 years, I’ve finally decided to create my first blog. This space will be used to share my views on various topics and to showcase my projects (yep, especially for potential employers!).
Its full of Stars Link to heading
I first encountered the “internet” in the late ’90s at an exhibition. Until then, it was something we only knew about from books and magazines. As I recall, the first site I visited was Yahoo, to create an email address. I got my first PC in 2000, and with it, my first dial-up internet connection. Requirements were very small back then; my primary use of the internet was reading emails and updating my antivirus. (I think every floppy disk I received had at least one virus on it!) Downloading music was tempting too, but with the low speed and connection instabilities, it wasn’t practical. Web browsing was very limited due to the time-based charging of dial-up lines. However, we did browse a couple of popular chat sites and forums that were common back then. And those were really slow and buggy.
The Megabytes Link to heading
Then, around 2004, we moved to DSL connections, and things improved significantly speed-wise. browsing was mainly used for searching and forums. Forums were a big deal back then, and their admins were genuinely keen on making the sites super fast. We had all those speed counters and stats pages displaying various information about browsing speeds. Design-wise, most of the sites were very basic with minimal dynamic content. Flash was very popular back then, but in my experience, it often slowed down sites and, in some cases, made them buggy too.
I created my first site/forum around that time, and as usual, speed was the main concern. The first versions were running on Apache. I then changed to Nginx and finally to LiteSpeed. There was very minimal knowledge and availability of CDNs then, and we used all kinds of plugins and configurations to get the fastest possible page loads. By the end of the day, we managed to make our sites load in under 1 second most of the time.
Fast and Furries Link to heading
In the current era of fiber connections, internet browsing is as fast as it can get, most of the time. Excluding shady sites packed with advertisements, some legit sites seem to compromise speed to improve their look and feel or their tracking abilities. In general, this is acceptable, but it becomes a problem when you are browsing multiple websites simultaneously, gathering data for a project or troubleshooting an issue. (AI is somewhat ok for this but most of the time human wins at least for me) Because in a way these additional layers in the website will put a strain on the browser and then pc or laptop itself. I understand the need for tracking and the design value of a website, but with my past experience, there are ways to speed up page loads while preserving the other aspects of the site.
Warp speed, Mr. Sulu Link to heading
Keeping these thoughts in mind, and as a personal experiment, I’m starting this site/blog with technologies I believe will help achieve faster page loads, even with analytics and monetization in play. I’ll also be hosting this site on my home network to increase the challenge. The main idea of this project is to use static websites with CDNs and server optimizations. I’ll be sharing the details and findings from time to time as blog posts. So, wish me luck populating this site and attracting visitors to a level where I can gather some usable data!