Blogging and all that Malarkey

My website wasn’t slow. At least, it didn’t feel slow. But after moving it to Netlify and taking a closer look at the numbers, I realised I was asking browsers to do more work than they needed to, and I was serving far more data than I thought.

One more week until we break for August, so last week was all about tying up loose ends with Lockrose and Portico Investments

I’ve been on a mission to improve performance since I migrated this site to Eleventy, especially after I realised I was burning through bandwidth once I moved to Netlify. Some of the biggest offenders were the animated illustrations I use across the site. They look great, but they ain’t cheap.

Oh, deary me. It has been a while, I've got to say. Sorry about that. In this episode of Unfinished Business, Rich and I catch up after far too long and fill each other in on what’s been happening in their worlds.

It’s a couple more weeks until we break for our August break, so I’m trying to finish off my work on Lockrose and Portico Investments.

When I redesigned Count Binface’s website for his 2024 general election campaign, I made custom illustrations of the nation’s favourite intergalactic space warrior. I had no idea what a global phenomenon he’d become.

I have a couple of smaller projects to work on before we close the studio for the August break. I started one of them, for property investment consultants Portico Investments, last week.

I mentioned earlier that I’ve been replacing the WebP images on my website with AVIF to reduce file sizes and decrease bandwidth usage. But when I started converting my portfolio images, I noticed something odd. Some weren’t smaller—they were bigger. Sometimes much bigger.

The images on my website have changed formats several times over the decades. JPEG, PNG, and GIF were designed in a very different era of computing, and their compression methods reflect the technology available at the time. Formats such as AVIF, HEIC, and WebP use newer techniques which can preserve more apparent detail while storing less information.

For years, I said that one day, when I could, I’d buy the camera that played such a big part in my early career. After 35 years or so, this Sinar P2 5x4” camera is finally mine.