The state of Less-Email.com

In August of 2019, I launched Less-Email.com. That was a considerable project. Nine months in, here is my retrospective; a keep/try list for future hobby projects.

Keep

• Register a domain name

• Hire a professional artist to design the logo

  Both set the tone of seriousness that motivates me to push on, late evenings, to deploy a result.

• Explore new technology
• Develop what I care about having. Build what needs building, scratch my own itch.
• Automate constantly. Each terminal command I capture in a script. Document whatever I can.

Try to do different

• Avoid WordPress. WordPress seemed like a good idea, but I found Wordpress’ database (mysql) mixes content (less-email recipes) and platform configuration. Every WP plugin installed gets immediately intertwined with the content database, making it very hard to CI-deploy only code, or only content! To top it off Wordpress is just plain slow to load.

Next web site, I will trade WordPress for a JAM-stack, like this blog. It is fast, cheap to host, simple to secure, and comes with a cleaner separated back-end. Come to think of WordPress: I don’t WANT a mysql database for posts, that in itself is a most terrible storage mapping. Markdown posts are a lot easier to edit and update. Plain-text always beats databases for raw content.

• Ask my network for tech choices advice. It can be hard to spot what’s the latest trend. That’s how I picked WordPress: every one is doing it. The professionals I call my friends generally know what’s hot and a good fit for my idea.
• When learning new technology it’s challenging to build unit tests. But on the other hand, unit testing consistently accelerates learning, development and forces understanding. So, even if it is hard, by the time you passed three steps beyond hello world, spend an evening on unit testing, and take it from there.

How I feel about the project Less-Email.com

I learned about WordPress, refreshed some PHP (20 years ago!), but that was no fun. The fun was in my creation coming to life. I am pleased the site is so stable, it is a sad it has little traction yet. I guess I should be marketing it more - i.e. shove it down people’s throats!

To migrate the servers, I now converted it into a static site (using WP2static). That boosts performance. I suppose now is the time to keep nudging people to it.