New Domain

Wed 13 August 2025

After almost 18 years with my old domain (furidamu.org, acquired August 2007!), I found a new domain that should be easier to remember and spell: julian.ac

I've migrated my blog to the new domain, but I plan to keep the old domain and URLs active indefinitely, with redirects to the corresponding new address. Please let me know if you run into any issues!

I was also tempted by a second domain, julian.photo, to finally get more serious about editing and sharing my travel and animal photos. This project is still very much work in progress, I'm experimenting ...

Serverless Comments

Sat 09 August 2025

While migrating my blog to my new domain (julian.ac!), I realized that the service I had been using for comments had not been maintained in a while, and did not support easy migration to a new domain.

I've been very impressed with the simplicity and reliability of S3 in the >10 years I've been using it to host this blog, so why not use the same setup for comments? It's not like I need to support massive write throughput or millions of comments, so a very simple system is sufficient:

• All comments for a post are stored ...

Slimming Down

Sun 20 July 2025

This morning I got nerd-sniped by Why your website should be under 14kB in size. I had already optimized my blog several times previously, most recently writing my own static site generator in Rust, but according to the Cloudflare URL Scanner my front page was still a shocking 242 kB!

How could this be? Turns out 124 kB were consumed just by highlight.js, and a further 75 kB by a single screenshot from one of my posts. And this wasn't even counting another 258 kB from KaTeX, which failed to load in the Cloudflare scanner due to the CORS ...