Goodbye rcruz.es, hello rcruz.dev
This website has a new home: rcruz.dev.
Why a new domain
My old website lived at rcruz.es, in Spanish, and the English version was on a subdomain, en.rcruz.es. I’m not maintaining the Spanish version anymore, and it looked weird to keep the English one on a subdomain of a Spanish domain. So I bought rcruz.dev.
In case you wonder: rcruz.com is taken, and the owner wants more than $4,000 for it.
The old websites
Both are still online today, so here is how they look:
I will probably redirect everything from them to rcruz.dev in the future.
How the new one is built
The first commit was on July 28, and two days later the site had dark mode. It is a plain Jekyll site, hosted on GitHub Pages:
- No JavaScript framework. The only script handles the mobile menu and the sticky header.
- One stylesheet for the whole site.
- The homepage cards, the app colors and the changelogs are built from data files.
- The star counts in the Open Source section are updated by a GitHub Action, every Monday.
The font flicker
The first version had a font flicker on every page change. Each font weight was its own file, and each page only downloaded the weights it used. Moving to another page could need a new file, and the browser showed a fallback font while it downloaded.
The fix was to use variable fonts: one file per font, with every weight inside. The fonts are also self-hosted and preloaded, so they download at the same time as the stylesheet.
Each font also has a fallback that is measured to take the same space. If the real font is still loading, the text is shown in a common system font, adjusted to the same size, so the page doesn’t jump when the real font arrives.