Website improvements

At CF Benchmarks, we're always trying to improve our infrastructure.  One area we've been focusing recently is our website.

Last year we spent some time revamping the site.  We gave it more of a dashboard feel, improving the graphs and adding a bit more data content.  Once that was deployed, the data looked great, but we felt we could do more to improve our news posts.

Until recently, our news items were all simple text based posts that were difficult to write and publish.  We wanted the ability to produce richer content using a WYSIWYG editor with as few barriers as possible.  We also wanted to announce system updates and index changes in a more structured way, and allow people to subscribe to these announcements.

On a technical level, we wanted to simplify our website tech stack.  Our old blog relied on a CMS system that we weren't entirely happy with.  We'd like to remove the need for that system altogether.

For those reasons, we decided to split the responsibilities and now rely on two SaaS providers:

• We use Statuspage for system updates and upcoming index change announcements.  You can now view and sign up to the CF Benchmarks Statuspage.
• Ghost is a fantastic hosted blog/content platform that we now use for all our rich content.  You can read our latest articles and analysis on the CF Benchmarks Blog.

With these changes complete, we'll be publishing lots more interesting and useful content in the coming months.