New Website

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I thought I’d rebuild my site and take WordPress out of the frame. Why? Well I wanted to see how much faster I could make things, and to see if I couldnt learn a few things while I was at it.

Also, there are lots of reasons why one might want to do this, but in all honestly, this was just personal. I love wordpress – well, I still turn off Gutenberg – but it’s the default framework for most small websites now, and it has endless functionality and scope. I love building something in a WordPress foundation and adding on top of it. In truth however, WordPress’ ease of use and ubiquity is probably why sites you might build in WP don’t last too long in their minty-fresh status, as the client often gets in there and makes them explode with all sorts of plugins and weighs them down with ginormous image files or whatnot. Hey but that’s not WordPress’ fault though.

Anyway I wanted to get away from WP on my own site, as I wanted to learn how to speed things up manually, learn some new ways of doing old things, and I also wanted to stop relying on anything that wasn’t my own. No WordPress image thumbails, crap in the header, humungous hooks to clear out the functions file, nothing.

So what I have is a classic old skool php site. I’m still working on it and I am using BoltCMS for my Blog which has a number of benefits – one of which is that I will actually USE it. Well, that’s the intention! I ended up, on the old site, using these caching plugins and at one stage, I had three of them on there. Minifying, and caching and caching and laughing and optimising and shoving. Well I had no idea what was going on for a finish, where were my files being stored or called from? Was I caching something then minifying it elsewhere then caching that? It was stupid…and making small changes on the site was impossible, and so things started to fallow. And that’s what I don’t want. I need regularily updated stuff and an easy-to-update site. I also want a blogging system I will actually use: blogging my meandering and boring inner monologue from the toilet while I hide from the kids’ incessant screaming. That’s where this is all meant to be heading.