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Just some stuff I want to share with you

Rebuilding my website

Thursday 30 April 2020
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I started this website back in 2009 and based on WordPress. By using WordPress, I hoped that I could focus on the content and didn’t have to spend a lot of time on the technology. Boy, was I wrong…. Time for a major overhaul.

Although the initial setup of the site back in 2009 was straightforward, managing and maintaining the platform has proven to be complex and time-consuming. Due to the theme, the plugins and constant updates and changes by all developers involved in this eco-system, keeping the platform up to date was becoming a day job.

Since I did not want to spend that much time on the site, I gave up and over the last few years, my site was more or less falling apart. Google changed their maps setup and as a result all GPS tracks resulted in gray boxes with error messages. Over time, I also switched my way of storing and using photos a few times. As a result, the photos were in different platforms and one of these (the famous Gallery 2 photo album) broke down. And due to the changes in the theme, the visuals became horrible; making the site more or less useless.

Although I could update and reconfigure all the components and get the site back up and running again, I concluded that it was time to reconsider if it made sense to continue with the website and if so, review my way of working, the content and the technology that I used.

Since there is too much content on the site (although I did not upload any real new content since 2011) that I don’t want to remove; the conclusion was: let’s rebuild this thing.

And after quite some research, learning, converting and updating, the site has now been migrated from WordPress to a static website hosted on a freshly installed webserver.

This is only the first step of the process; getting WordPress and Gallery 2 out of the equation. There’s still a lot to optimize; I hardly spent time on the actual look and feel and content will probably move around over the next few weeks.

I learned a lot and will try to share my journey with you in future posts.

That’s it for now; I’ll be back…

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