About this website

I (Jeff) have been a bit annoyed at how bloated modern web sites are. Sometimes the heft is justified, but often it isn’t. In response, this site is an attempt at something lighter, partially inspired by (language warning) this website.

I like the idea of static site generators (SSGs). Most web sites don’t need to be dynamic. (One might argue that web sites, as opposed to web apps, don’t need to be dynamic by definition.) So let me write my content in a familiar format like Markdown, then compile the content into a web-site-in-a-directory and push the directory up to a server. I struggled to find an SSG I liked, then finally, perhaps suffering from an acute case of yak shaving, I decided to write my own.

You can see the beautiful Clojure code in the GitLab repo. The tests run in about 3 seconds. The site builds, from scratch, in about 3 seconds as well. (That’s longer than I’d like, but not too painful.)

When I push a new commit to the master branch on GitLab, an integration kicks in and deploys the site to Netlify, which provides hosting of static sites for free (even including a custom domain name, purchased separately).

So here we are. No mobile-optimized page (but your phone renders everything just fine, I bet). A web bloat score under 1.0. Some fairly light CSS stats. And a sub-second load time, even on a 3G network.