What's changed round here New CMS! New CSS!

14 February 2023 #meta

So yes, during the Christmas break I posted a brief call for help:

I can’t maintain this website manually any more, I need a CMS or something to make it easier. So I’m on the lookout for professional help - I have a budget, I’m happy to pay someone.

Charles Roper saw that, and put me in touch with his pal James Drever. And over the last week or so, James has been providing exactly the help I was after.

James and I have a lot in common and instantly got along very well, and it was a total joy working with someone who instantly got where I was coming. Someone who understood why I’d maintained a hand-coded website for so long, and saw the value in it.

Indeed, James pointed out that my amateurish HTML efforts scored a perfect 100 in performance-measuring tool Core Web Vitals:

A screenshot of gilest.org being tested by Core Web Vitals, and scoring 100% — 100% oh yes

Wow, ok. I never intended to make something that performed like that, but this high score is more a reflection on my ignorance than on my skill. I learned how to write HTML in the 1990s, when the web was young. I never learned to do anything more complicated. The old way - the simple way - is still the best if you want to optimise for performance.

It’s Kirby underneath

This new incarnation of gilest.org is different in the following ways:

The CMS is Kirby, recommended by James. I’m very pleased with it so far
All the old gilest.org stuff is still here - hundreds of hand-made HTML files, left exactly as they were. They appear in the archive, with new Kirby-managed stuff at the top
The RSS feed is still exactly where it was, but now has lovely browser-friendly styling of its own
The home page displays the 5 most recent posts in full (just like the old days)
There’s a neat & tidy menu that appears on every new page, and is easy to manage and change

And thanks to James, it still scores 100 on the Core Web Vitals performance test. Oh yes.

We still have a few more tweaks and changes to add. Nothing fancy mind. If you spot anything weird or broken, give me a shout. There’s bound to be bugs, right?