I Ditched AMP.

A few years ago, AMP (accelerated mobile pages) was all the rave across the internet and everyone wanted to get on board with AMP. It promised to be that be-all-end-all kind of solution to the slow speed (2G/3G) internet by serving a stripped down ugly looking version of your website through a CDN that caches your web pages in what could be called basic HTML/JS type of pages.

As the rave settled down, Most of us realized that it's not worth the effort to put each & every site on AMP. Main reason being that the served experience is half-baked and usually results in user inconvenience rather than being user experience improvement. With the improvements of HTTP/2 and HTTP/3, it is evident that eventually, most sites won't even need something like this. I Use Ghost to run this blog and it comes with an AMP integration built in. I never really bothered turning it off assuming that someone somewhere might get some benefit out of it.

However, that being said, I recently realized that I'm starting to hate more and more of the sites using amp and switching to their full mobile view experience. Which is far better than the stripped down AMP page and loads in almost the same time.

AMP was an ambitious idea trying to solve a genuine problem but in today's context it is no longer required when most of the world has moved to faster more reliable internet experience.

The only advantage AMP serves today is that it is believed by some that google favors AMP pages over regular web pages while indexing. I can confirm this behavior with discover feed where most of the links coming in try to throw AMP in my face. This has forced me to actually switch browser and move away from Google discover and start using my own list of daily reads. The thing is that I find reddit more engaging than discover feed when it comes to getting relevant and interesting recommendations.

The COVID-19 Pandemic has changed a lot about how we work, live and feel. I personally felt that the overall discover feed turned more and more bloated with redundant content with most "publishers" just publishing run-off-the-mill type of articles and nothing major actually happening around the world. Major sports events were cancelled or postponed, Major product launches and events were either cancelled or postponed. There is a major supplychain shortage going on for most IT hardware. There is simply a lot going on. It caused me to lose track on the blog as well. I'm slowly and steadily getting back on track. Hoping to write more in the coming days.

Till then, Feel free to leave your comments and feedback at my forum