Website launch! The fifth version, no more and no less. The first two (many years ago!) were in html, the third in AS3, and the fourth, which is the one most of you know, in Wordpress.
After more than 10 years, it was time to change to something more modern. Don’t get me wrong, Wordpress has provided very good service all this time. But, in the end, it had become more of a limitation than an advantage.
Those of you who have been here before may have noticed something different. However, I must tell you that, under the hood, the new page is actually made from scratch in AstroJs.
A change that you can imagine has cost a good amount of work (it hasn’t been a piece of cake!). Obviously, if I got into this mess, it’s not (only) out of stubbornness. But I had these goals in mind:
- Speed: The new page is hyper-optimized. Having made it by hand and with ❤️, it weighs 6-7 times less than the page in Wordpress. This means it is very, very fast (and it was already quite fast! ⚡).
- Accessibility: Designed to be inclusive and for everyone. I have taken great care with the typography, contrast, font size, no animations or frills, so that it is suitable for people with vision problems. In addition to tags to work properly with text readers and other accessibility aids.
- Content, content and content, as the center of everything. A new, more modern style and more comfortable for reading. New organization of articles, with more navigation aids, improved search, and tables of contents. All to make the experience as comfortable as possible.
Another novelty is that the new platform allows me to edit previous entries more quickly. In Wordpress, I had the creation of new entries very automated, with scripts for publication, photo uploads etc. Buuut, editing previous entries was a pain.
With the new page, this no longer happens, now I can edit all the content as “a whole”. What consequence does this have? Several. The main one is that it stops being a “blog”, to become a “content website”. The date becomes less important, to give importance to the content.
The other direct consequence are the new courses, which are itineraries where you can read the content more comfortably and structured. Now you have Arduino, ESP32, Raspberry Pi, and (in progress) 3D printing and electronics. But in the future, I will expand to electronics, C++, and C#. Depending on how I feel, to be honest.
And that’s all I had to tell you today. I hope you like the redesign, and that there will be a website for another 10 years. Lastly, as always, thank you very much to all of you who visit here!