Website update 2020

Its been quite a time I remained silent but I'm glad to be back with my new blog post! And why not? Because there are so millions of things to talk about! This time it is about my website updates.

Some words about my old website

My previous website was in pure Wordpress stack. Don't get me wrong, there is nothing wrong with Wordpress. I still love Wordpress. At the time of this writing, Wordpress still powers 35% of all the websites on the Internet (while the second contender is not even 3%). Yet another strong fact is 62% market share among the CMS market.

Wordpress is open-source software that is both free and priceless.

Wordpress has become one of the most successful opensource projects of this era which has given countless publishers the tool they need. Thanks to developers and contributors around the globe who have spent countless hours building and improve upon the tool step by step.

My best guess is that Wordpress will continue to dominate. What is expected to change is the way Wordpress will be used. As the web ecosystem is changing faster than ever, Wordpress itself is evolving. I'll be writing about new ways to use Wordpress in my future blog post.

So what is exciting about the new website?

I've chosen a fresh new stack as a platform for my new website. As a developer, I always want to improve. I learn every day. I see interesting pieces of work that I admire from creative people around the world. I still do browse lots and lots of websites every week; bookmark and end up with desires to have some of those nice features to be included on my own. The problematic thing for me is that I wished to reflect all those pieces of my skills on my website. Because of this little emotion, I hardly could make any decision on which trend to follow.

But this time it was was not just the design. Even not the interactivity or the front-end user experience. Previously when I stumbled upon this issue, it would be about all the interesting animations including page transitions. I got lured to redesign my website with single-page javascript frameworks but SSR (server-side rendering) was the setback. Besides this, I had a few more good to have requirements:

• The website should be lightweight, resulting in fast loading
• Respect web accessibility (eg compatible to screen readers)
• Have a futuristic approach to web semantics
• Good user experience (clean, minimal and readable)
• Offline app experience with service workers

It was about the time to make the switch. But there were so many options to choose from.

• React: Next, Gatsby
• VueJS: Nuxt
• Svelte: Sapper
• JAM Stack: Hugo, Eleventy

And my choice is ...?

It's already mid-2020! And JAM Stack has already become the new buzz word in web development. I've been a huge fan of Hugo ever since it was launched in 2017. Its main selling point is the fast compile time which is not a concern for the blog of my size.

Eleventy was love at first sight! Having already used it in a real project at work, I can say it is really very neat. This project has not yet reached 1.0 but I bet this will become one of the most used static site generators very soon. I think more features will be added soon as the community itself is growing very quickly.

Next and Gatsby are getting a lot of attention lately. I can see so many new websites are being built using these stacks. Although the tech stack is quite impressive, my expectations were still high. I wanted the power of both and simplicity that is available in none of them (because of the inherent heavy React javascript runtime common in both of them ). The same was the problem with Vuejs's Nuxt.

You might have already guessed by now, my choice is Sapper which is powered by svelte. Although I've used svelte for more than a year now I didn't think of powering my website until I deep dived into Sapper.

Why Svelte and Sapper?

Svelte is the most complete web framework that has started a radically new approach to web application development that makes the most sense.

Svelte is more like Tesla bringing electric cars with so many nice to have modern tech goodies all at once while other manufacturers were struggling to improve one feature at a time.

Some of the key reasons for me to Sapper were:

• lightweight and less javascript for the browser to process
• Server-side rendering and static export both available
• single-page like experience to end-user
• Progressive Web app feature baked in with offline page availability
• Good developer experience
• Much more

I could continue to go on but if you are interested you should try it out yourself!

If you are interested in front end development and haven't tried out Svelte yet, then you are trying to run away from the future.

What next?

I'm currently settled with the stack but I'll continue to improve in bits and pieces over time. With svelte, there is so much possibility. With technology advancing very fast, we never know what and when things will change.