78 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
78 lines
3.9 KiB
Plaintext
---
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title: The day I Jam’d
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subtitle: A story of unusual tools and fun gambles.
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lang: en
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slug: "the-day-I-jamd"
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excerpt: Ooh, yeah! All right! We’re jammin’
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tags: ["Dev", "Jamstack"]
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type: articles
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createdAt: "2020-10-08T09:00:00.000Z"
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updatedAt: "2022-12-27T15:40:06.000Z"
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---
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import AstroImage from "../../../components/AstroImage.astro";
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export const wordpress = "https://assets.nardu.in/wordpress_8ee6f54b98.jpeg";
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export const strapi11ty = "https://assets.nardu.in/static_2c0d9f1eb8.jpeg";
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## The not so easy choice
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When I was still using Wordpress for my personal website, I thought it would be nice to try [OpenLiteSpeed](https://openlitespeed.org) webserver. Being a designer, I always like to have a graphical interface and I heard OLS had very nice caching and overall performances.
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## FIGHT!
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A few years later, I learned about Jamstack and its incredible potential. Not being impulsive at all, I chose to entirely remake my website with tools like [11ty](https://www.11ty.dev/) and [Strapi](https://strapi.io/).
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I remember Strapi still being in alpha/beta and colleagues telling me it was a risky gamble, especially since I was pretty new to the node.js world.
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> Open source and french? Sign me up!
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So I started recreating my website identically with 11ty and Strapi. Same hosting on a Digital Ocean droplet, same webserver, same content. I had done a fair amout of performance optimizations on my wordpress install so I was eager to compare the results with the new static version.
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Boy did they exceed my expectations! With almost no optimization on the static side, I got the following results.
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### wordpress
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<AstroImage
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src={wordpress}
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width="728"
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height="412"
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alt="Performance score of 53/100 on Wordpress."
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/>
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Despite a lot of efforts I could not do better. I’m no expert in caching, do not use CDN and relied on plugins to achieve a lot of stuff (php not being my strongest skill 😬).
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### 11ty + strapi
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<AstroImage
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src={strapi11ty}
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width="728"
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height="412"
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alt="Performance score of 97/100 on jamstack."
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/>
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Almost **zero** special configuration (I was too anxious to test) and I reached an awesome score. I know lighthouse scores are not everything but hey, **53 vs 97**… I’ll take it!
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## Now kiss 🥰
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Both of these approaches have their benefits and drawbacks. As a freelance, my clients often prefer or ask for Wordpress because of its reputation. I always present a Jamstack alternative when possible but it’s still scary to most compared to Wordpress. I feel however that it’s going to be easier to use Jamstack with time.
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## I did it again…
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Here we are now, a quarantine and a few months later and this website is running with… [Nuxt.js](https://nuxtjs.org/). I know, I’m sorry, I couldn’t resist the latest [nuxt content](https://content.nuxtjs.org/) functionnality.
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So I re-did everything again… and let me just say: **wow**, what an experience!
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I **love** developing with Nuxt. Using nuxt content allowed me to focus on design and, well, content.
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No more Apollo client and graphQL query, only markdown and a few promises.
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Don’t get me wrong, I really like working with Strapi and its graphQL capabilities but for the purpose of this website, nuxt content does it (extremely well).
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I’m still using Strapi as a way to upload, store and manage images, videos, gifs, etc. It might be too much for this use case but I like to know that I can still go back to it if I want to! Also, I spent quite a bit of time setting it up with OpenLiteSpeed and I’m still too attached to this accomplishment to let it go.
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## In the end
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Wordpress, Jamstack, vanilla everything… Does it really matter? For me, the dev experience was far more enjoyable working with 11ty, nuxt.js and strapi than with Wordpress.
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On the performance and accessibility side, it also seems to be the better/smarter choice. It might not be everytime! ¯\\\_(ツ)\_/¯
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Can’t wait to learn [astro](https://astro.build/) and start from scratch again!
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