When I set this site up, I used Google Fonts and Font Awesome as a way of exploring some nice fonts, getting them served, and using some cute icons for my footer and the license page.

Now I’ve looked at the network requests made by the site, I realised I don’t necessarily want every visitor (all, erm, none of you) to send a bunch of doubtless-interesting traffic to Google. I also ran into some weirdness with FontAwesome running locally, notably that I’d get occasional spates of errors when connecting to my hosted copy of the font.

I also realised that the font is several hundred KB for, uh, *counts*… 8 glyphs. To save all of that hassle, I switched to inlining the SVG elements in the HTML. I did this through the cunning method of using Font Awesome’s SVG+JS setup, capturing the SVG elements once they were generated, then pasting them back into the HTML.

I’m sure there’s a better way.

I also removed the Google Fonts references and found the original versions of the fonts, as credited here.

There’s now no Javascript on the site except for the Mastodon feed loader, so things should be nice and smooth. Thanks to the amazingly fast response to this issue I raised, that script even works async now.