Updates to the Site

Since changing the layout of the blog I also did some optimizations to enhance it a little bit. Most of those enhancements were proposed by Google PageSpeed, another one I took from the theme setup pages of the used theme, others are more or less mandated by law ;-).

So what did I do?

• I optimized the used feature image and my “avatar” using jpegtran which decreased the initial file size by about 10 percent for each image.
• I changed my Nginx config to send out Cache-Control and Expires headers for all static assets set to 1 year from request. Here is the config snippet I added to the corresponding server directive:

{% highlight Nginx %} location ~* .(js|css|png|jpg|jpeg|gif|ico)$ { expires 1y; } {% endhighlight %}

• I added the async attribute to some of the locally hosted scripts to hopefully shave of a little time by asynchronously executing scripts.
• I also added a basic cookie consent notification using Cookie Consent and a little cookie policy site (located here). The text is more or less shamelessly stolen from Silktides own privacy policy site.
• Next I added support for responsive images using the Jekyll Picture Tag plugin suggested in the original theme setup pages of the Minimal Mistakes theme.
• And last but not least I added Jekyll HTML compression to compress the generated HTML just a little bit. This reduces the index page by about 1570 bytes (which is by about 16 percent) using the following settings: {% highlight Yaml %} compress_html: clippings: all comments: [""] endings: all ignore: envs: [] blanklines: false profile: false startings: [html, head, body] {% endhighlight %} It’s not much, but it’s not bad either and it depends on what markup to original markdown document contains, so numbers will differ.

All in all those are all just micro optimizations but I learned some new stuff and I won’t have to do it in the future.