Comment by dangoldin | Hacker News Reader

Comment by dangoldin | Hacker News Reader

Earlier this year I spent some time moving my blog to AMP and so far I'm pretty happy with the move. It's hosted on GitHub pages and I made the decision to go full AMP (including Desktop so I never went the /amp/ subfolder route) and allowed me to convert every existing page to AMP without having to have a new set of URLs.

It's noticeably faster but there are a few hiccups I had to deal with - JS needs to be in isolated iframes and getting Disqus comments took a bit of time but in my case the performance benefit outweighs it. At the same time I could just simplified my design without going full AMP and it probably would have been just as quick. The biggest frustration is that if you make any CSS changes it has to rebuild every single page since the style needs to be declared inline rather than as a link to a CSS file.

For those interested: http://dangoldin.com/

I don't know what you did there, but it takes about 8 seconds on my desktop before it displays anything. Talk about "accelerated".

Edit: I checked with the Developer Tools, but I have no idea what is going on there. Assets are fully loaded within 500 ms, and then it just sits there for another 7.5 s before rendering anything at all. (I will note that cdn.ampproject.org is blocked by default in my uMatrix.)

Does it get faster when you don't block it?

Apparently yes. (Not on the same machine, but I just checked on my work notebook where I have uBlock rather than uMatrix, and cdn.ampproject.org is let through.)

Ah interesting. Thanks for bringing this up. I use uBlock but didn't have any issues rendering it. Since I don't really care about the SEO/Google hosting it it might make sense to just link to my own locally hosted version to avoid the adblocking block.

Wow, the pages on your site load so quickly they're finished rendering before I even start reading the article. Thanks for sharing this. Very cool.

Yea - that was my first experience using it for some of the news sites and I ended up spending a weekend redoing my entire site to do pure AMP for desktop as well. The general idea of AMP is to avoid forcing a "rerender" of the DOM so it tries to do as much processing beforehand in order to only render the page once. This is why you have to specify the CSS inline and associate dimensions to each image.

Glad you liked it!

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