After finding the cure for my chronic bronchitis I set out to create an e-commerce website helping sell botanicals from Indonesia to the United States. My initial site design was using a headless e-commerce starter I created with a Shopify back-end but I wasn’t satisfied with the speed nor speed.
The Reaction system I use now provides a microservice architecture based around a GraphQL API using MongoDB for persistance.
The storefront, shown below, uses a customized version of the latest Example Storefront stable release and the entire system runs on less than 2GB of RAM.
Neoclassic port of the well-regarded textfile archive site textfiles.com. Now with 57,000+ never-before-seen textfile preview pages.
:: Hugo / After Dark / Shell / HTML / CSS / ES6
The textfiles-mirror website is an ambitious port of Jason Scott’s
textfiles.com website to After Dark. This “dot-bit”-ready site includes a number of unique features not available on any existing mirror including 57,000 preview pages with both light/dark themes.
This site was built to stress-test Hugo to determine the limits of scale for the static site generator which claims to be one of the fastest. At this scale, Hugo chews up about 14GB memory to build the site and requires approx. 1-2 minutes to build on an 8-core i7.
Jekyll migration to WordPress, premium hosting, custom relational database, newsletter, contact form and AdSense integration.
:: WordPress / Pantheon / Route 53 / CloudFront
After 7-8 months the Jekyll version of Chicago Gang History we started seeing some scaling issues with media assets on
CloudCannon. Rather than hacking it I instead worked with CGH author Zach Jones to perform a complete site redesign, leveraging existing ad revenue to migrate them to WordPress self-hosting.
The redesign was very successful and inbound search traffic continued to lift. A year following the redesign homepage hits are now greater than 70K per month.
Hosted site migration to Jekyll, AdSense, SES email forwarding, contact form, newsletter, vanity domain, hosting
:: Jekyll / AdSense / Amazon SES
After 6 months working with WordPress.com to create a site themselves, the author of Chicago Gang History wasn’t seeing the kind of traffic they’d hoped for despite all their hard work. In fact, before I found them, Chicago Gang History had had less than 1,000 total visitors—after six months!
Upon examining their content I found a treasure trove of niche content which simply needed a little love. Confident I could improve their online presence I made Chicago Gang History an offer they couldn’t refuse.
