5typos.net
New Theme
You1 might have noticed the schizophrenia the site experienced over the past week as I tried themes left and right.
For about a year, I’d used the Scaffold Theme and really liked it. It worked well with my linkblogging mood and embedding fad. And while it wasn’t great at longer posts, the frequency I write those didn’t justify stressing over it.
Problem was/is, speed.
A few weeks ago my buddy Federico mentioned that sometimes the main block wouldn’t load at all. After testing with loads.in, I managed to see the error, but given my skills, I couldn’t optimize the code2 to make a difference.
Even worse, consistently the site would take 3 seconds to load (a big no-no in google ranking land), even from fast connections.
Setting up CloudFlare helped a bit, but not enough. I was already pissed that my site was slow, which is the geek equivalent of your car is cooler than mine.
Trying a bunch of themes made it painfully obvious that the cooler the site looks, the slower it loads. Days went by, and no theme in the tumblr directory —even premium ones— managed to strike a balance.
At which point I did something desperate. Something I do every time website envy strikes me: I installed wordpress and jekyll on my server.
I won’t bore you with the details, I’ll just tell you this:
Static sites are in my future, but the future isn’t here yet.
Through the magic of GitHub, I found Rasmus Andersson old tumblr theme (he since moved to jekyll) and after a little code and Google web fonts tinkering, the new 5typos.net was up.
I’m going to continue playing around for a while so feel free to let me know if you have any comments, but this will be the new base.