Kysol

For the longest time I've been a firm believer in minimising of code bloat. A few years ago I was tinkering with a small Swift project only to be horrified by the size of the final result. I ended up rewriting it from scratch in Objective-C which yielded an executable that was less than 1% the size of the Swift project. For what it did, I couldn't live with running a 12Mb packaged piece of software, when it could easily be written in under 100kb. This same mentality finally got to me with Wordpress.

Now in no way am I going to trash the platform, it has it's purpose and does it well, but I'm also not going to defend it when it comes to bloat. I started using it because I was time poor and needed to get a platform online that I could just set and forget (until updates needed to be done), but after a while I started to notice performance issues. Pages taking longer than a few seconds to respond was the final straw. I tried installing caching plugins, and even went down to config tweaking with PHP and MySQL, but nothing worked. I also thought that it might have been my host, but after testing some simple DB connections,

I was now convinced. Something had happened in the Wordpress core, some "feature" had been added in an update that started to slowly impact my install. I really didn't have the patience to try and troubleshoot the install anymore, so at the start of September 2019, I decided to just turn it off. I'd be losing all of the search engine results pointing to exisitng articles and guides, but I didn't care, I just couldn't let the bloat live on.

I could say that this whole thing was written from scratch, but it wasn't. I had been working on another platform a year or so back codenamed "Catch The Sun". It was aimed at providing a lightweight framework focused on getting as close to perfect Google Pagespeed results as possible. It was dead, but some of the classes that I had wrote for it I liked so I ported them over. After almost a month of dabbling here and there in the morning before work, I got to a point where I was happy to release it to the public. Not 100% complete, but enough for me to continue posting again.

For the moment, please excuse the lack of functionality, limited visuals, blank pages and any buggy interfaces that you might come across. This is a side project that I can only work on an hour or so each day, so it could be a few weeks until it's next release. If you do find any issues that you are willing to share, please hit me up on Twitter, it's probably the best way to get ahold of me these days.