Tuesday, April 9, 2019
I recently discovered a new style framework that I fell in love with called Picnic CSS. Previously, this website used Bulma for its styling, and while I still love it, Picnic CSS has a significantly smaller file size than Bulma. My recent pet project has been to make the GUTS+ website as small and fast as possible while still looking good, so I’ve stripped out the Google Analytics script for tracking usage, I replaced the FontAwesome library with a customized font from Fontello that only contains the icons I use on the website, I learned how to deliver the site contents in a gzipped format, and now I’ve cut the CSS styling down to about one sixth of its original size! I want this website and its rules to be accessible from as many places as possible with the smallest possible footprint!
In addition to this website change, I’ve added a minimally-formatted offline page that gets downloaded to your browser and stays updated with the most recent rule changes every time you visit the home page with the offline-first power of UpUp. This only applies to web browsers that have been updated within the past couple years (i.e. it needs to support Service Workers), but if you don’t have an internet connection yet you’ve visited the GUTS+ home page since this was posted, you can still read the rules! Try it! Load up the home page, turn off your internet, and refresh the page! If your browser supports this feature, it should load up the offline page.
I hope you enjoy these changes and that they are helpful to anyone who might need to access the GUTS+ rule books on an airplane or in the Himalayas!
UPDATE: April 11, 2019 - For full disclosure, I have added Fathom Analytics to the website running via https://analytics.guts.plus. It is a very lightweight service that tracks user counts and sources and nothing else. If you visit the analytics website, all of the data collected is anonymized and public. I am only using it to gauge interest in GUTS+ so I can know what is most and least used on the website.
UPDATE: June 18, 2020 - I switched out Fathom Analytics for Matomo. It is running on a server in my office at home, and it’s still very lightweight and anonymized.
UPDATE: September 26, 2023 - I’ve changed the analytics to an extremely simple system I developed called TinyStats. No personally identifying information is collected at all, and it’s still exclusively to gauge interest in The GUTS+ System.