And yet another website change!
Another blog post, another website update, right? 😛 I grew tired of fighting with WordPress in Google App Engine, but actually the main reason for this change is that the CloudSQL bills were quite hefty! Since WordPress needs the database for pretty much everything — even with extensive caching — the CloudSQL instance has to spin up almost every hour of the day. So it ended up running 24/7 and that costs more than I'd like for a simple site like this.
What I did was ditch WordPress and switch to an entirely static website. I lost some dynamic features like the search, and I didn't bother to implement categories for posts, but I gained speed and simplicity. 🙂 Also the RSS feed is currently not implemented, ping me if you need it and I can add something. Anyway, I wrote a custom tool that generates the site from a few templates, and App Engine just serves those static HTML files. The generation takes only about 2 seconds, which is nice. You might wonder why I use App Engine for 100% static content? Indeed the site could be served from a CDN (speaking of CDNs, I added one for the images on here, go me! 🙂), but I'll reserve the option to do some dynamic stuff later on, should a need arise. So let's see how this works — personally I'm very eager to see some savings on my hosting bills! 😉 I might do an update later if anyone is interested.
Oh wait, actually there's the new theme as well! You did notice it, didn't you? I wanted something simple and responsive, so I took Bootstrap and quickly whipped up something. It's quite basic but shall do, for now.
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