Heiko Mamerow

Web development with WordPress

Hello world!

Welcome to my new website. This is my first post. After 3 years of not publishing and just reading others weblogs I decided to freeze my old blog and make a new start.

Funny thing: My old website started in January 2012 and was running with Twenty Twelve. Now exact 10 years later i changed first time my website and also the theme – Twenty Twenty-Two.

As you can see there are some things different now:

  1. New Language: Switch from German to English
  2. New Theme: Hello Twenty Twenty-Two and hello Full Site Editing!
  3. New Server: Easy going with OpenLiteSpeed
  4. New Domain: Its just an “v”

I will explain a little the topics.

New Language: Switch from German to English

The most important motivation for my new start is to write in English. Because English is the lingua franca in computing. The potential English reading audience is bigger then just the “German bubble”.

My target group are the more or less experienced web developers – like me. There is no need to write about webdev things in German (or other languages) if you have only this group in mind.

My old website heikomamerow.de in German still exist but is outdated of course. RIP.

New Theme: Hello Twenty Twenty-Two and hello Full Site Editing!

Originally i wanted to do the new start with an custom theme i wrote myself. The theme was even ready since summer 2021. It has a minimal approach and it should become my reference for using the famous Tailwind CSS.

My origin new theme.
Code example Tailwind CSS
Once you get used to Tailwind CSS, the code is not that ugly at all. 😉

But when i found out that the Twenty Twenty-Two should appear with Full Site Editing (FSE), i changed my mind.

Very briefly, i also thought about changing my own theme to FSE. But I had no desire to do so. Because I wanted to do other things in my vacation than just sitting at the computer.

My experiences with Twenty Twenty-Two and FSE have been very positive so far. Although I had no experience with it before, I was able to get used to it very quickly. First i spend some hours of digging into FSE. Best starting point is the excellent Block Editor Handbook. With this knowledge it is possible to quickly start working if you already experienced in theme development.

I wished I could use the origin theme as it is. But there are a lot of things I wanted to have different. Therefore i make an child theme and tweaked Twenty Twenty-Two a little. You can see my code on GitHub.

Honestly there are for me still some things to do with the theme in the next days. First i will fix the vertical jump of the hamburger when toggling:

Animation of the vertical jumping hamburger menu
The hamburger menu jumps vertical when toggling

Also i will animate the menu toggle and make the overlay little transparent.

But for now: Good enough is the new perfect! 😉

New Server: Easy going with OpenLiteSpeed

Beside the theme change I also change the web server. My old server was H2O. This was at the time (one of ?) the first server who had supported all the new HTTP/2 features when they came out. And also he performed better then nginx.

There was actually no reason for me to switch. I just wanted to try something different. In my daily work I use Apache and nginx. I need some new.

My choice has fallen on OpenLiteSpeed. This is the open source variant of the LiteSpeed Web Server. And like the name already suggests it is an server for web performance in mind.

I was totally impressed about the server and the hole thing behind it. But this could become a separate posting. Therefore here only the most important in short.

OpenLiteSpeed already brings a complete docker include WordPress with it. You just start Docker et voila the hole web server is ready. With all the shiny bling you expect from an web performance server:

  • Caching
  • Page optimization
  • Image optimization
  • Database optimization

I will report about it in a later posting!

LiteSpeed Web Server was also the first server who implemented the HTTP/3 protocol. This should improve the performance. But that doesn’t always work in practice.

Screenshot from my website with open developer tools showing the network data.
For the ultimate bling: HTTP/3

In my case the website is with HTTP/3 about 10ms slower than without. This has nothing to do with the protocol itself, but how it is integrated. But it is worth it to me. I will explain it later in an separated post.

Nevertheless OpenLiteSpeed is my new favorite server.

New Domain: Its just an “v”

.dev make sense because this blog has to do with web development and i am a developer – huh. 🙂


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