meta, magick#

Fri 11 Sep 2026 03:25:23 PM UTC

I ran cripslock through PageSpeed Insights a few weeks back and was aghast to see how slow it was. No small part of this was due to having been uploading 4096x3072 phone photos directly onto the site and letting Boxy deal with presenting them at a suitable size - resizing client-side does nothing for the transfer size. Obviously.

So this is just a short blog post about blogging software: I have added luagraphicsmagick to the build, and use it to scale images to 1024 pixels before serving them, which should reduce their size approximately ninefold for little loss of quality.

(I also recently added a search box, which is in the sidebar)

When I went back to PageSpeed after deploying that, it said I should use srcset, and a better image format, and better compression, and do a bunch of other not-necessarily image-related stuff I'm also not doing (setting sensible cache headers would be a good one), and I am putting off doing almost any of it because I feel I should be spending the time on things I can write about instead of on polishing the platform where I write it. It also said I score 0/2 on "AI readiness", and my only question there is whether (and how) it's possible to get a negative score for that. OK, that's two questions.

Things I could be writing about but am not include

• diagnosing an electrical problem and replacing the reg/rect on my motorbike (unwritten as I haven't actually replaced it yet, because the wires on the new one are too short)

• diagnosing a why-is-it-spitting-fluid-out-of-the-overflow problem and replacing the oil/coolant on my motorbike (unwritten until I can find out why it's refusing to take the full volume of new coolant)

• rigging up the Liminix wireless extender in the shed to use SOPS for its secrets (unwritten because I ... well, mostly because I just haven't written it)