This has been coming for a long time now. This website has been up for about 5 years, but of those, it has been in a massive state of disrepair. It’s time to move on.
This website was created with WordPress out of a necessity. My previous site was built with simplestyle_purple, and every page required manual generation. The content all had to be hand created with a template I knew very little about, and as such, managing formatting was a horrendous nightmare. I had a retro site around that time as well that was just about as equally bad, maintenance wise, and WordPress had a lot of options that I liked.
This site and software lasted me through the entire emmVRC craze, holding two of the most lengthy postmortems I’ve ever written. My goal with this site was to document my adventures with tech, both with my organization as well as standalone projects like my arcade ideas. All of these ambitious goals, considering how bad I am at updating things all over the place, so the fact that it fell through is not surprising in the slightest.
WordPress is an absolute nightmare to manage. I didn’t realize how much maintenance would be required at the time, or how costly on system resources it would be to host. On my old DigitalOcean setup, the resources for the site would constantly max out my system resources under load, and it led to a lot of issues with the other services running on that host. It was later moved to self-hosting, and the load problem *somewhat* went away, but we’re now dealing with new issues, like how occasionally, the database connection will give out and WordPress will just serve an ugly error. Pair this with how much of a nightmare modifying someone else’s theme was to get the look of the site I didn’t even use and… yeah, you can kinda see why I want to move on.
Enter, Heartstone.me
This site is based on my own code, meaning I know the intricacies of all the HTML and CSS going into it. It’s designed with older web browsers in mind, meaning you can use this on computers all the way back to the 90s! It’s sleak in design, but still accomplishes everything I want from a website. The gallery is still not ready just yet, but with my new knowledge of backend code, I can put something together that should be just as functional as this site was, while being a lot less stressful, both for computers and humans.
As far as blog stuff goes, while I can do this with this website, I kinda want to give some other platforms the love.
You can access my modern blog content on my BlueSky page. This is where 90% of my blogging will go, if anywhere, so be sure to check it out! And of course, you can access the website I created, Heartstone.me.
As for this site, I will be giving plugins one final chance by using one to convert the entirety of this WordPress disaster into static HTML, so I can ditch all the backend requirements and just let this site serve as an archive of all this old content.
Thank you for supporting me through all these years! Hope you have an amazing day, and I’ll see you around!