As you might have noticed, my website has been updated with a new structure and appearance. I wanted it to have a clean, minimalistic design with easy navigation. During the last four years I was using Wordpress CMS with Santiago Magazine theme. It was simple in everyday use and colourful, yet it came with a disadvantage: it dramatically incrased the size of every page of my website. Home page had a size of 4 MB, a single article (with no images, save for three thumbnails) – 3.8 MB, etc. It didn’t cause any slowdown to me due to a relatively fast internet connection, but it bothered me, as it meant that visitors were using too much of their bandwidth accessing my site, and if they happened to had a slower internet connection – it could also mean noticeable delays in displaying content; not only due to sheer size of a page, but also to the fact that every time it had to be generated from scratch on the server side for each user.

Therefore I switched from Wordpress to Jekyll. Jekyll is a static website generator. The name explains it all: the whole content of the website is generated once and uploaded to the server, and every visitor can access the same version of any page, prepared earlier. That means that there is very little delay between sending request to the server by the browser and receiving final content of a page. It doesn’t have to be generated dynamically while visitor is waiting, it’s already there, waiting for the browser to display it on visitor’s screen. Without the need of using scripts and SQL database to store articles every page and post is miniscule in size – it takes a couple of kilobytes instead of megabytes, reducing both the bandwidth used and loading time. I believe you will find the current website lightweight and more responsive than its previous iteration.