Earth Notes: On Website Technicals (2021-06)

Given a fresh prompt by Good news: Google no longer requires publishers to use the AMP format. Bad news: What replaces it might be worse, I think I may remove AMP pages next month.

An outline plan, spread over several weeks if needed, is:

• Take header/amphtml links to AMP out of the related pages, and add noindex to all AMP pages.
• Wait at least a week and/or until AMP page count in GSC close to zero.
• Stop generating and remove all AMP pages, letting them be redirected to m-dot pages individually.
• Redirect entire amp domain to m-dot or desktop as preferred.

I was able to add a whole new article series without any sweat!

The first three pieces are up.

Weather has been quite grim with low PV generation over the last ten days or so.

A five-hour broadband outage, possibly a RADIUS problems in the wholesale supplier upstream of my direct ISP. Starting up a DSL/FTTC session worked, apparently, but our (static) public IP address was not assigned to the link, and there was no inbound traffic...

I have split out header CSS minification into a separate pass after the full HTML page has been generated. That eliminates a lot of complex logic to guess early what CSS to retain and what to drop.

This logic was not always right before. Now nothing should be dropped that is needed. A little more that is not needed should be dropped.

The upshot is that a few minimal pages such as the 404 page are a little smaller, while a few others are a little larger.