In 2016 I wrote “My name is Maurits van der Schee and I love thinking about software architecture and building high traffic web applications” in my first TQdev.com post when I migrated from WordPress to a self-written PHP blog platform. I wrote “I love the idea of gradually (while writing posts) making this blogging software feature complete”. It was an experiment that lasted for 9 years and most of the time everything was working great. I’ve spent a lot of time writing articles and almost no time improving the blogging software.
AI tools love Markdown files
Recently I’ve fallen in love with AI generative tooling and that’s why I decided to switch to a Git based approach and to the (to me familiar) Hugo static site generator (SSG). With this file based Markdown approach I can quickly let AI run through my posts, check for errors and do quick checks for consistency. Whenever I need to edit hundreds of files I let AI write small scripts to do the tasks I want it to do. Having all your posts version controlled in Git and in Markdown files on a local disk makes a huge difference. I could ask an AI agent to download all images for all posts to the “static/img” folder and replace all references that used to be hosted on Imgur. Also an agent was able to convert all code with HTML code-coloring to proper Markdown code blocks with the right language annotation.
Why not Zola?
In 2023 I wrote the popular article “Zola SSG is 4x faster than Hugo” and you may ask why I switched to Hugo and not to Zola. Zola is faster and easier to use as you can read in the article. The reason is that Hugo is still more popular: Hugo has 84k stars on Github and Zola “only” 16k stars. Another reason is that my brother (who owns and runs UseCue web development) is a great fan of the Hugo SSG (so I can ask him questions whenever I get stuck). He is also known as the creator of UseCue CMS, a full-featured CMS for Hugo, so he knows a thing or two about Hugo. Last but not least I’ve found a nice Hugo theme called “PaperMod” that I liked for my blog (the one you are seeing now).
New visitor counts
I also came up with a new way of counting visitors. In WordPress I was using a plugin called “Count-Per-Day” which counted the number of unique IP addresses that visited different pages per day. This plugin does no longer exist, but I recreated that functionality in my own PHP code when writing my own blog platform and that’s how I generated the top 10 list of popular articles that month (and did analytics in general without Google). In the past 3 months I have seen an enormous rise in bots visiting my blog. This was skewing the visitor count a lot, so I came up with another approach: a JavaScript fetch of the footer content from a PHP script. This way everything on the website is static (except for the footer) where the analytics are shown (and are collected).
Future of TQdev.com
I’ll never let AI write my blog articles, nevertheless I will let AI proof read for spelling mistakes or let it suggest style changes. This allows me to write faster and better. Like with code or documentation the author stays responsible for the tone, relevance and quality of what is written. You will see that the visitor count will be a lot lower as search engine bots (and the new AI bots) are no longer counted as visitors due to the new JavaScript method of creating analytics. RSS readers (the feed still has the full articles) are also no longer counted as visitors. This blog is Big Tech free and I’m proud that I’m not buying analytics from Google at the cost of your privacy.