So if you’re one of the handful of personal contacts that actually reads this (or one of the random bouncing strangers that has stumbled on something curious and probably boring), things look slightly different.
To you, that is. To me, they look significantly different, as I’ve spent the last week of evenings (and the entirety of a Saturday) refreshing the guts of the site, finally.
There was a time when I refreshed them regularly once every year or at most every couple of years. That was the way it was back in 1999–2005 when this whole site was static pages generated to be a “site” via bash scripts that auto-uploaded via FTP (well, apart from that period when I was hosting it myself on a Sparc IPX, those were the days).
Then it was Graymatter for a while, and then WordPress and then Drupal for a while and then back to WordPress and… Things hadn’t really been refreshed under the hood since about 2013.
To give you some indication, I had been using a completely self-coded body of PHP and CSS on WordPress on top of the BlankSlate (no styling whatsoever, no widgets, no nothing) base theme. Last time I updated “everything,” I was still building my own site essentially from the ground up (well, okay, using WordPress to manage a DB, and to be fair, that’s a lot, but to be conversely fair I even had some pipes built from the shell environment because sometimes I still liked to do things manually from bash).
Anyway, this has been overdue for a long time. I work on a lot of websites and things that are halfway website halfway browser application, and in a whole world of Node.js and Vue and Elementor and other modern stuff, my own personal website was a bunch of hand-crafted CSS and PHP typed into Sublime on a WordPress instance that had been gathering debris for like a decade and a half. Well, those days are finally officially over.
We look the same on the surface, but under the hood from a management perspective we’re lean and mean and hand-coding only where it counts now and as a force multiplier, the rest in a modern block-oriented template system. Yes, there is still a minor amount of my own code to do stuff like pull archives and maintain the list of favorite posts and so on, but now it’s all done properly as a plugin rather than being inline <?php ?> everywhere spread throughout the universe. I figured it was time to do it right, even if it is “just” for my own site.
This year has also seen me switch web hosts as well.
I expect things that are broken to pop up here and there, especially at first (and especially typefaces and images from the past, where I’ve had a habit of linking across DBs and filesystems rather than making things local to one host and instance… which I’m now paying for). But they’ll get sorted out in time. I thought it was time to flip over to the new instance “today, come hell or high water” (hence me writing this at 1:15 in the morning).
But in any case, welcome to Leapdragon 2023. Finally. Which will hopefully unlock the ability to more easily do some of the other stuff I want to do here (without getting buried in a morass of going back through my own hastily tossed together personal website code, as was the case before).