Almost a year ago, I wrote about a tweak to this very website that split off the films into their own sub-site, to try and speed things up as a publisher. It turns out, the more you write, the more a static site generator struggles to keep up.

Well, fast forward to the present and I’m very happy to say the films are back home where they belong - all within mrschristine.com. It’s only a slight change but it makes a big difference - the films appear on the homepage now, in all the same feeds, and in the More to Explore section on the sidebar.

It turns out, after quite a lot of investigation, that it was those extra exploration pages that were causing a lot of the damage. One of the key things for me, using this website as a bit of an archive and extra memory box, was being able to look at the Films by Year page and quickly search for a film - either to check whether I’ve reviewed it, but more often, to remember what I thought of it.

Along with the year segregation, however, I also added in directors and actors, and that’s where we start to fall down. Those tags were working very much like the regular tags, creating a page for each so that if you wanted, you could head to a specific URL for each that would show you all the films for, say, Steven Spielberg. That meant thousands and thousands of pages that I a) don’t need at all and b) didn’t even realise were being created. Throw in the books and albums as well, and we’re talking a lot of wasted pages and a clear explanation to the sluggish nature of the site and to why it started butting up against hosting page limits.

It’s still a concern, the volume of posts I have and am still creating, and the fact that static-site generators aren’t necessarily geared up to deal with a blogger like me, but for now, at least, we’re back in business and all under one roof. Now, what film shall I watch to celebrate?