19 years of blogging – Andy Balaam’s Blog

October 22, 2024 [Writing]

As you may know, I recently upgraded my blog from WordPress to Zola. This means my home computer does the work of rendering the page to HTML once, and my web server only has to provide the rendered HTML to your browser. This means pages appear faster on your screen, and perhaps less energy is used in the process. I also took this opportunity to make the pages less cluttered and more focused on the content of the articles.

So if you’ll allow me to indulge a little, I’d like to take a look back at the history of this blog.

Technology changes over time

I started blogging in 2005, wanting to talk more about free/open source works, especially my TV guide FreeGuide (still going strong). My approach is RSS-first: I write the RSS XML files myself, and write some simple Python code to generate an HTML website from the RSS, and then I upload it all to a free web space provided by my Internet. Service Provider.

In 2007 I moved to WordPress because I wanted to be able to write blog posts on the go, and WordPress allowed me to type them into web forms even if I was on the train or at work. I’ve been using WordPress for a long time – it gives me the flexibility I need, and I don’t want to break existing URLs.

As the blog became more popular, I made incremental changes to try to speed up its performance – I upgraded to a virtual server from a shared web space, and then paid more for a more powerful server. I installed various caching plugins, which serve to reduce the overhead inherent in PHP-based systems like WordPress that render your pages quickly whenever requested.

The next significant technological change occurred 16 years later, when I installed a WordPress plugin to allow following blogs directly via fediverse.

Statistics

Some statistics for you:

• 19 years of blogging so far
• 517 blog posts
• 140 images and videos
• 150 people followed the comment thread via email (sorry, lost in the transition, but you can re-register in the new system based on Remark42)
• 4 people following via fediverse (sorry, I lost this in the transition! Please follow @andybalaam@mastodon.social)
• 655 comments
• 176,945 spam comments were blocked, according to Akismet
• 7,637 IPs blocked by Limit Login Attempts plugin
• Total visitors 378K since I switched to Koto analytics in 2020
• Peak traffic: ~15k views/month (2016-2020, when my YouTube videos got more views)
• Current traffic: ~3K views/month
• Time to build in Zola: 13 seconds

Highlights

Transition

I’m determined to keep as many URLs working as possible, and one of the appeals of Zola is the fact that I can control post URLs exactly as I want them.

I did need to write some code to make this happen.

Here’s some homework that brought me here:

with many more to come.

Enjoy the next 19 years

I hope this new format pleases you. I’m pretty sure the pages will load faster, which should make life a little more enjoyable when you land on one of my pages.

Contact me and let me know what you think! You can leave a comment below, send me to Mastodon @andybalaam@mastodon.social or join my Matrix room #andybalaam:matrix.org.

Or, as has been the case for the last 19 years, just follow the RSS feed!