I started cheveedodd.com nearly two years ago. At the time, I made the decision that I wanted a fast, flexible site that didn’t have a bunch of code and scripts running in the background that would slow things down. I made the decision that I could code the site myself and build it all from the ground up as a collection of static (nothing behind the scenes) pages. I worked pretty hard over the past few years to make the site functional and attractive and I’m quite proud of it.
Today, I retired it.
It’s still there, in case you ever want to visit again. I’m going to leave it in tact as a sort of archive and to maintain all the old links from around the web. Much of the navigation will be broken… I’m not going to fix that. Sorry. I’d rather move forward with this new site, which is why I made the change. The new site is built on WordPress. I picked a theme that provided similar functionality to my old site, then I customized it heavily with my own CSS.
What does it all mean?
Well, simply, I will now be able to focus my attention more on providing content. Writing the pages by hand got in the way. I can write a new post in 15 minutes or less. When it takes an hour or more to build the page and site links for it, I suddenly lose enthusiasm. WordPress handles all that for me now and I’ll be able to spend more of my time on the site writing and responding.
Oh, a bit about responding…
The old site didn’t have a comments section. You had to navigate through my forums to reply to a post. Most people didn’t bother. In fact, there was no meaningful discussion to transfer during the site move. If you liked one of my old posts, or you always wanted to say something but never did, go back and comment now. That’d be cool.