Over the past few months I've been working on a new stylesheet for this website, and today I finally pushed the redesign branch to production! The previous CSS code was largely written almost 10 years ago and only received small updates and enhancements. Since then, new features like flexbox and grids were added and made creating responsive websites much easier.
Turns out, the new design looks exactly the same as the old one!
A few things did change though:
- Wrote plain CSS instead of LESS.
- Stopped using
floatto position elements in favor of flexbox. - Followed the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG).
- Made the stylesheet a lot smaller.
- Focused on readability throughout the website.
I also tried to get some insight in how people used the website:
A year in statistics
Most of the traffic to this website is routed through Cloudflare's CDN. I've configured it to cache everything, which means the access logs on my web server record only part of the actual traffic. This creates an interesting dataset: I can see which pages are most visited, but I can't see spikes due to pages being shared somewhere. For the same reason, my statistics about browsers, operating systems, referring websites and returning visitors are completely skewed.
Popular pages
Articles are the most popular pages on this website. That makes sense, as those tend to show up in searches and are shared more frequently than others. My most popular articles are technical ones:
- Managing services for non-root users with systemd
- Creating a C.V. with LaTeX and moderncv
- Cross compiling Go applications with Make
That means I need to write more articles!
Popular 404 errors
The most common 404s appear to be scanners looking for vulnerabilities.
WordPress related pages like wp-login.php, xmlrpc.php and several files inside the wp-includes directory lead the race, followed by Joomla's administrator directory.
My work to fix broken links (using data from the access logs and Google Search Console) seems to have paid off. I've also been trying not to delete or move pages for a few years now. When a page is no longer relevant, I replace it with a small message pointing people to alternatives, like I did with my OTR fingerprint listing.
Another interesting 404 page is /irc:irc.quakenet.org/sorcix,isnick which seems to be caused by a spider that doesn't understand irc: URLs.
Future changes
I've been looking into IndieWeb after reading a few blog posts by Jan-Lukas Else. People can reply to your articles by linking back from their own website, or by using one of the provided IndieWeb-compatible services. As I'm not active on mainstream social media, this may be a great way to connect with like-minded people.
Features I want to roll out next:
- RSS feed for articles
- Overview pages for every tag, making it easier to find related articles
- Support for Webmentions