Goodbye Google

Today I've removed every single trace (I think) of Google from this website because… I shouldn't need to explain this right? I'm sure you know the reason.

It wasn't that hard, there were only four things I was using, and in some cases there was an improvement in functionality when switching to a different provider. Lets go through all four of them now:

Google Analytics

This one is simple, I removed this script tag from the page layout.

<!-- Global site tag (gtag.js) - Google Analytics -->
<script async src="https://www.googletagmanager.com/gtag/js?id=UA-114590042-1"></script>
<script>
    window.dataLayer = window.dataLayer || [];
    function gtag(){dataLayer.push(arguments);}
    gtag('js', new Date());
    gtag('config', 'UA-114590042-1');
</script>

This hasn't been replaced though because I don't really care about how many people visit this site anymore.

Google Fonts

Previously I was serving fonts from fonts.googleapis.com because I wasn't bothered to download them and serve them myself.

<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Herr+Von+Muellerhoff">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lato:300i,300,400i,700,700i">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Libre+Baskerville:400i,700">
<link rel="stylesheet" href="https://fonts.googleapis.com/css?family=Lora">

I've also taken this time to remove Lora from my fonts (because you shouldn't use more than 3 fonts styling wise) and clean up some css, so the site should be slighlty faster now.

GSuite

I don't even know why I chose to use Google for delivering emails but it doesn't matter now anyway. I've switched to Sendmail, and while I don't really like Twilo (Sendmail's parent company) either, there's a few advantages to this:

• I can use my propery domain; Where previously I would send emails from noreply@noreply.justinduch.com because Google requires domain verification and my MX records for justinduch.com point to Protonmail, meaning I needed to use a different subdomain. Now I can use noreply@justinduch.com because Sendmail doesn't required domain verification.

• It's free for the first 100 emails a day, so as long as I don't get over 100 subscribers, I won't need to pay.

• Not Google.

Also GSuite seems to have a few issues.

The only other option I could see was managing a SMTP server myself and that seems like a pain in the ass.

WebP Images

This one probably doesn't matter as much, but for the past week I've been tampering with different image types to see if it would speed up the load times. Moving to WebP didn't actually do all that much and it cost me Safari support, so I've just moved back to pngs.

Update 12/06/2019: I forgot that the search bar uses Google (and the fact that there even was a search bar) so I've switched it to use DuckDuckGo.