August-December 2024, a Long Road Traveled
Okay, it's been a long road.
My site has seen a number of incarnations in its history going back well over a decade, and even longer if you include name changes to reflect my journey. 1995 I think even.
Back in August, I finally had enough of seeing warning messages that server version, various software that I use and other tools were starting to show their age and some in the future would be reaching the end of their support limits.
For anybody familiar with how websites work, they'll know exactly what I'm talking about there but for those that don't, let me explain. There are different ways to approach putting up and maintaining a website and the average person out there eventually comes across some of the advertisements for website hosts, website builders, etc. Some of those are relatively easy for someone who doesn't have any idea how this stuff works to get into putting up some relatively decent websites.
I've been maintaining and building my own websites practically since the internet became a thing, and those easy what you see is what you get website Builders just don't do it for me because it's usually very soon that I find limitations that prevent me from doing all of the things I want out of my site.
I do all of it and that includes testing and planning new features, ideas and approaches to its presentation, and interaction visitors can have with the site. If you can't tell by now, I'm into a lot of different things and a lot of different people visit my site, and usually for a lot of different reasons.
It's no small challenge to be on top of all this stuff and for as directionally uncertain I can get at times trying those new things, refining things I'm happy with and finding any number of little things that trigger my artist ocd, well, that can add up to a lot of time. When I finally have to decide I've had enough of something or need to do updating it's usually no small task.
In a renaissance of sorts if you can call it that, I finally buckled down and decided I really want to be able to have open discussion and communication between people enjoying my stuff, and showing interest in the things I'm working on. That involves implementing features like everyone is already accustomed to like one would find on Facebook, Twitter and even old school message forums.
I do everything on the site, the artwork, the composition, the back end coding on how one navigates, as well as a ton of other things I'm just not going to try to explain here because they're going to be lost on a majority of people who already don't have the experience with it. I don't have a team of people to monitor things and if I'm going to retain my own sanity I have to shift gears to cover all of the different things I do.
Well, here it is December and so far everything is working solid and I think I have a community solution I can build into the site. More on that in a different news piece though. I'm really hoping everybody enjoys the environment that I've tried to create here, and as always appreciate comments, suggestions, and critique. It's all valuable.
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