New Year, New Site

Happy 2023 all! Though, with the way the world has been going, let’s just say I wasn’t staying up till midnight to ring in the new year. I was making sure the last one was really leaving! I kid, last year was actually a banner year for me. I secured a job at a workplace I love, traveled a record number of miles, and got married to my favorite person in the whole wide world!

The new year doesn’t hold an awful lot of weight as a moment in time in my eyes, though. I’m not going to any crazy parties, or making resolutions, or singing any anthems. (Auld Lang Syne is still a favorite though.) But thanks to the holidays, the world seems to just chill for a week or two. Perfect time to reflect and see how I’m doing, and to rebuild my website for umpteenth time!

So here we are, this time brought to you by good old WordPress. Having run my site off of markdown and static site generators for years, it’s just really nice to have the nice CMS experience WP brings to the table. I’ve tried things like Forestry in the past, but compared to WP, there’s a lot of configuration and testing to make everything work right, and even then it’s not a great writing experience on a phone. I’d like to think I’m a pretty capable web developer, so I felt for a long time that I have a sort of responsibility to be building my own site from the ground up. Nowadays, I care more about actually writing and posting things than building and rebuilding and rebuilding the platform. Before, I never got around to actually posting anything, but with a setup like WP, I can just start writing. Drafts are built in. RSS is built in. Thanks to plugins, Syndication to social media, adding/changing post types, and webmention stuff is built in. And if I feel like spontaneously trying something different, or flipping to a different or custom theme for a day, I can do that and not really break anything. Takes a great deal of stress off!

I’m not exactly long-winded, so you won’t see many long posts here. If you do, I probably spent months drafting it, and I’m not doing that all the time. But I will be using this site kind of as if it were a social media profile with no limitations on post types or character limits. Get ready to see everything, from the high-altitude cake experiments to fun code snippets I found, to that weird furry art I do sometimes!

Cheers, internet!