What happens when you hate your site?

Okay, so, I last touched the previous incarnation of my site back in 2007. For someone who builds websites for a living, it seemed odd that I hadn't taken the time to update my site. I was busy building everyone elses' sites that mine languished. At some point, it became retro, and somewhat of a badge of (misplaced) honor to have something so old-school up. In reality, I became embarrassed of my site, not really wanting to show it off, given how just out of date it was.

When you hate your website, you don't use it. If using it isn't easy, you don't do it. Seems simple.

Updating it was hard.

My server died and I had to resurrect it enough to get the data off. I had items I didn't want published on the old site, such that I didn't want to import them into a new site. I needed to update my site from whatever Drupal version it was to the latest version, and really, I didn't even do that, opting for Drupal 7 instead of cutting-edge Drupal 8. And then there's all of my pictures, located in 5 different spots, only 3 of the installations of which I control. And integration with ki.tt, and the SSL certs that go with all of that and oh, good lord.

So, I stopped using the site on the 23rd of November of last year and started in on this site. It took longer than I expected, mostly because I was (and somewhat am still) unhappy with the design. I'm not a fan of the redo, but it's better than what I had before. With the base theme I have on the site, I can whip out new changes quickly, so I'm happier with the site overall.

Of note, one of the biggest changes I did with this upgrade / relaunch, was disable the open RSS for the site. I found my site copied in its entirety in a number of places across the web. I also found a lot of images hot-linked. Both of those ripoffs rather annoyed me, so, I disabled the open RSS feed, which was the source of the import. If you read content from this site via an RSS feed and want my site in your list, contact me and I'll set up a private RSS feed for you. I'm good like that.

With this relaunch, I hope to embrace this site again. I'm back to writing a lot, so maybe that'll spill over here.