Disclaimer: These are my personal views and do not represent any organization or professional advice.

Thu, 29 Jan 2026 08:16:53 +0200

I've Gone To Great Lengths For This Silence

Since launching https://wild.gr, I have received zero bug reports or complaints about the website and have not found any issues posted across social media. People love to complain online, so to receive no reports after tens of thousands of unique page views, to me, means technologically, this website was a success.

I have seen many comment sections rife with complaints about websites rather than discussion about their content; the content becoming secondary to the technical or stylistic issues. It's too slow, The images are uncompressed!, Text contrast is too low, It doesn't work with javascript disabled, It looks crappy on mobile and so on. Not wanting this to happen, I carefully designed the site to get out of the way of its content.

The way I create websites is unique. Excepting images, every page is a self contained HTML file with no external dependencies, culminating in a single network request for each load. My static build system embeds the favicon, css, svg images, javascript and other assets into every page as-needed and minifies the resulting HTML. Compressed by the server, each page is a single 5-15kB network request with any images loaded lazily by the browser as they come into view.

Ooh, this is one of those artisan, hand-crafted websites! I'll have to post this to my Instagram. I once met an old web developer in the south of France who would wash the bytes by hand before uploading them to his server. Said it was a family tradition passed down for generations. —Anonymous (from the KISS Linux testimonials)

Probably not worth a mention due to the ubiquity of the practice, all images on the WILD website are served in multiple sizes and formats allowing the browser to determine the right one to load. This saves bandwidth on small screens at the expense of more disk space on the host.

Disable javascript on any of my sites and all functionality continues to work, albeit with fewer bells and whistles. It is important to me, information stays a navigatable web of documents instead of morphing into a clunky application inaccessible by screen readers and simple web browsers. Viewed in terminal browsers, all information is navigatable and accessible.

Of course, this means all business must be conducted over email, but I prefer it this way. It retains the human element lost when business happens automatically and robotically. The people I have met and meaningful conversations I have had, far outweigh the manual labour.

There is no technical limitation preventing largely static websites from being beautiful, functional, accessible and fast, at the same time. There is no excuse for needing loading screens and 10+ second long loading times to display some text and images.

This is what makes my websites so fast and it is only possible by doing away with complicated frameworks, heavy web fonts and third-party integrations like invasive analytics, payment processing, advertising and social media embeds.

I've spent a lot of time ensuring my websites WILD, KISS Linux and personal blog remain small, simple and fast. To quote "God" from Futurama: When you do things right, people won’t be sure you’ve done anything at all.

I've gone to great lengths for this silence.

—Dylan Araps

P.S. I am sure to get bug reports from this post as it will prompt people to go looking, and bugs if sought, will be found. Send me an email if you find any.

P.P.S. The title of this blog post is a reference to a post I wrote in 2019 about the KISS Linux website: archive link