It's about damn time I got this sorted
This site has been "Undergoing A Complete Redesign" for almost 8 months now. And I'm starting to get to a point where I am comfortable making blog posts, and putting content onto this new system I've built. As there's just a few style changes, and few extra features to add, then I am going to put it live.
What do you mean "put it live"?
At the time of writing this, I am still testing the site, making sure everything works, and that everything looks good. It still has a way to go, but for the most part, everything is working as expected. I have built my own custom admin panel to manage all the content on the site, and everything works perfectly there.
The front end has all the content on which I want, I just need to do some final tweaks with the styling (a few things look terrible on mobile, for example). But assuming I continue with the pace I have had this past month, I should be putting this site live by the end of July, just as I want.
Why do I want it live by then? Because I want a way to document my time in Japan, which I leave for early August. I went to Norway last year, and got less than a dozen pictures, and didn't really have anywhere to put them, so I don't actually have any pictures anymore, apart from the few I put onto Twitter.
The same goes for when I went to Brazil, which was about 3 years ago, however, I did put a few more pictures onto Twitter that time - though still not a lot.
I still have to actually add the functionality to this site, but what I am aiming for it something where I can simply put a description of the day, and upload pictures to, and it will list it all in chronological order. Hopefully it will make for interesting reading too, but it's more for my own personal recollection, as I haven't got the best memory in the world, and it would be nice to be able to remember by adventures a little better, seeing as I can barely remember what I did in Norway, let alone Brazil, or any of the other countries I visited prior.
What's new about this site?
If you saw my old site, you may remember that it was simply a blog and nothing more. But now I have created a few new systems for me to easily work with, which means I can do reviews for games and anime quite easily. I will also be adding manga reviews at some point too, but that will come after adding the travel log feature I mentioned earlier.
For now, it will just be for blogs and reviews. Currently there is no comment functionality, though this is something I will be looking at. Though I want a good way to deal with spammers first.
Why move away from Wordpress?
The old site ran on Wordpress. I never hid that fact, and I don't think Wordpress is a bad platform for what I wanted, and still wouldn't be a bad choice now. However, I always mentioned I wanted to build my site from scratch, and after becoming a full-time web-developer, I felt I heard learned the skills required to do it. Nothing seems to have broken so far, which fills me with hope.
Also, Wordpress relies a lot of Javascript, and I set myself a challenge when I started building this site. Javascript should not be needed for a single part of this site. I could have built my own Wordpress theme, and not used Javascript at all there, but you would still have had to load Javascript content as "required" plugins (e.g. for SEO) and Wordpress itself, all put Javascript in to be loaded. Yes, I will be using Javascript for Google Analytics, but that's it. Not a single feature on this website is to be inaccessible/degraded if you do not have Javascript enabled.
