Static-Sites

Drop a single <script type="speculationrules"> JSON block into your HTML and the browser will prefetch or fully prerender the URLs you nominate before the user clicks them. With a prerender rule and moderate eagerness, hover-to-paint latency on a typical content site collapses from 400-900 ms to under 50 ms, and you do not need Next.js , Astro , or any client router to get there. It is a plain platform feature shipping in Chromium-based browsers, with Firefox and Safari tracking the spec at the WICG.

Drop @view-transition { navigation: auto; } into your stylesheet. Modern browsers will then cross-fade between same-origin page loads on their own. No SPA router, no fetch() interception, no JS framework needed. Add view-transition-name to shared elements like hero images, headings, or nav bars, and the browser morphs them between separate HTML documents. This works today in Chrome 126+, Edge 126+, and Safari 18.2+. Firefox support lands through the Interop 2026 push.

You can build a working static site generator in about 100 lines of Python. The result reads Markdown files from a content directory, parses their YAML front matter, converts the Markdown to HTML, wraps everything in Jinja2 templates, and writes the output to a public/ folder ready to be served by any web server. It is the same fundamental pipeline that powers tools like Hugo , Jekyll , and Eleventy - just stripped down to the essentials so you can see exactly how the pieces fit together.

CSS Anchor Positioning is a browser-native feature that pins any absolutely-placed element to another element in the document. No JavaScript required. With the anchor() function, position-anchor property, and @position-try rules, you can build tooltips, dropdown menus, and context menus in pure CSS and HTML. It now works in Chrome 125+, Firefox 132+, and Safari 18.2+, which covers about 91% of browser traffic. Pair it with the HTML popover attribute (Baseline 2024) and you get show/hide toggling, keyboard dismissal, and top-layer stacking for free. The JavaScript tooltip library is dead for most use cases.

By subsetting a variable font with pyftsubset to include only the Unicode ranges and OpenType features your site actually needs, and serving it as a WOFF2 file with the CSS unicode-range descriptor, you can reduce web font payload by 70-85%. A typical setup drops a 300 KB variable font to under 40 KB while keeping full weight and italic axis support for every glyph you actually use. This post walks through the entire process from font selection to CI integration.

You can run a self-hosted Plausible Analytics instance on a $6/month VPS. It uses Docker Compose and a Caddy reverse proxy for automatic HTTPS. The whole process takes under 30 minutes. Once it runs, you add one <script> tag to your site and you’re done. No cookie banners, no personal data collected. The tracking script weighs under 1 KB gzipped. It stores everything in a ClickHouse database on your own server, and gives you a clean, fast dashboard for your traffic.