About a week ago, I resumed blogging and started to revamp this blog. I felt there was too much thing going on unnecessarily.



I removed gadgets at bottom, took down many JavaScript codes and CSS rules, removed theme switching. Now the blog has only dark theme, it used to have switch for color, font, and other style. Fonts have been changed, because I switched to Google Web Fonts, I don't want to serve from Google App Engine. Sooner or later, the bandwidth usage will reach the cap. It actually looks nice with those fonts, though it's quite in different style.

640 pixels, still 640 pixels in width for post content, the same width of most images. Some lines and background color are removed, it looks more seamless when you scroll from top to bottom.

One important benefit from all of these is loading time down to around 5 seconds from 10 seconds. The reduce of loading time is expected since I removed the heck of many things. If I don't use them, then don't put them in. While I was planing the revamp, I checked many blogs which I have subscribed to. 5 to 10 seconds loading time is very common. I've achieved a nice result.

There was one thing I noticed most, other people's blogs don't use footer much. It seems to other people, other than me, they love sidebar. By love, I do mean love. I would say 9 out of 10 blogs have sidebar, and probably half of which don't have footer if you don't count the typical copyright statement line.

I for one who doesn't really like sidebar. I don't have a particular reason, maybe they aren't very useful to me. I always look at top navigation and stuff at bottom of page. Many bloggers stuff too many widgets to their sidebar, it's not a bad behavior, just sort of wasting because visitors don't usually pay much attention to those. At least not after first visit.

During the process, I also tried to find a web service for feedback. At first, I thought GitHub Issues should be good, but not everyone wants to sign up for an account just to post. I didn't want to use very commercial-like service, those have too many buttons and options, I have no idea how to use them.

I then recalled the Google Moderator, that could be a better option, simply because most people have at least one Google account. It's even better when considering the voting, people can rate suggestions or ideas. Most of all, it's simple.

I quite like how my blog looks now, there might still be something I can improve.

Simplicity is a word I like.