I managed to remove Bootstrap from my website! For me, it was the example of vendor lock-in.
A few years ago the trend was to use cloud provider but not enough to feel locked to a particular provider. In practice compute service was the only service allowed to be used. Everything else was an attempt from the devil to keep you down. The cause was lack of trust. Compute didn’t matter that much, it was not making anything more complicated, it was somebody else virtual machine.
Now it is clear that services like object store, managed databases, queue systems, machine learning or serverless are the secret of success when it comes to cloud providers. Because those services are stable and available for you to use quickly with zero operational effort. It gets harder to move to another vendor but there is not a lot you can do to avoid that. Motivation avoids vendor lock-in.
For me was the same, I tried many time to remove Bootstrap from my website but I never cared enough about the outcome, because I am not a designed and… really I don’t care.
Friday 17th December something changed! I had time and I was up for something boring, so I made it! I replaced Bootstrap with a couple of CSS classes.
Goodbye navbar
I decided to remove the navigation bar at the top of the website. First, I don’t know how to make one on my own. Second, the number of pages were limited to three. Not enough to justify a real menu. Now a post contains the content and nothing more, very clean and I think it helps stay focused on what matters.
I left a small link to get back to the list of the other posts I wrote and that’s it. This is not a magazine and I won’t make any money out from this website, no reasons to drive you to other articles. Also, the people who reads what I write are good enough with computers to figure out what they want on their own.
Your browser is cooler than me
No extra fonts, or font size, I tried to limit the number of html tags winning in accessibility. I trust your browser ability to interpret HTML and the font you have installed should be enough to read what I have to write! Let’s get back to simple things.
ADV or not ADV
I removed Google Analytics months ago. Is it time to remove ads? I didn’t make much money from this website, probably not enough to justify a banner and that javascript. I owned enough to run this website for other 10 years and I think it is enough! I reached sustainability! And you don’t need to thank me! I am the fist one using Brave as a browser, blocking noisy banners. I think the majority of the people reading my posts do the same.
The downside is that for me joining the Carbon network was a goal I had a few years ago. Because there is number you have to reach in order to enter the program. Adv is the only source of vanity number of this project and I kind of like to use $ for this even if it is a bit more than “nothing a month”. I don’t know, if you have feedback let me know!
My feeling is that 2022 will be all about finding other source of income that are not coming from my spending hours writing code. Not sure if spending time writing articles counts just yet. Probably not what I want.
What’s next
Not much, my readers are not many, and this year I didn’t have much to write about. A website with fewest components will enable me to experiment a little bit more. An item for my invisible todo list is to write a yet another static site generator. The word needs more Rust code… who knows.
Probably it won’t happen. I don’t have special needs, but if will happen, you will notice!
Credit
I think I am reading too much what Drew DeVault writes! The minimalism of this initiative comes from his webiste. My friend Lorenzo, when it comes to CSS is a person I admire. He is good with eBPF as well but not as good!
Have a great Christmas!! Relax and do what you like with the people you love!