It has been a really long time since I had my own website so I decided to do something about it.

A perfect score in Lighthouse pays for a bit of hard work!

Since some years ago I have been lazily blogging on Medium, which eventually became part of my web presence together with the usual twitter and instagram. To add even more fragmentation, I was also using a landing page on about.me as a place to redirect my personal domains.

It was really time to consolidate as much as possible in something more personal and more apt to my values, so to speak.

In particular, those were my goals:

• A statically generated website: security, performance and something new for me to try out

• Total control on design and rendering: I wanted a way to express myself and to provide first class accessibility and usability support

• No cookies: the very last thing I (and my readers) want is to deal with the freaking EU privacy requirements

• No 3rd party content: all assets are served by my own server; the idea is that my visitors should not leave any trace somewhere else (i.e. Google Fonts). I am also thinking of just disabling my own http logs, eventually

• Content served from my own server: I want total control not only how I deliver my content, but also full control on the HTTP headers (no Google FLoC, fine graned security headers, etc)

• Content sindication: I hear rumors that RSS will probably go back in fashion someday, so it's better to be ready :)

And this is what I have now.

Honestly, I am not sure I will be able to keep all my promises; in particular it is possible that I will eventually:

• use Cloudflare as my CDN (I trust them and I think they are doing a great job)

• use Webmention to see if it can be useful for me and my readers

With leaving Medium I have had to give up on a couple of nice things:

• goodbye sexy statistics: not a big deal given my "numbers", of course

• goodbye network and feedback: again, not a big deal but I will probably going to miss those rare "claps" and comments. It is also true that over the years I didn't get anything fungible from those interaction anyway

For the comments I think referring a Twitter thread will be more than enough. A "like" on the tweet will do as a clap :)

In a next more in-depth post I will talk in details about the technical aspects of the implementation, since I believe more people could do what I am doing. The maintainance of a static website is ridicolously smaller compared to anything like WP, for example.

For now I just want to say that I am using Eleventy, after having considered Hugo.

Comments, likes? Use this Twitter thread!

Cheers!