I'm a very impatient person. The plan was to wait for a few months until the code on FartDump was a little more robust before I moved the software over to my other sites, but I couldn't wait.
I use a site called ahrefs.com to crawl my websites and find problems like broken links and things of that nature. The site crawls my websites about once a week and sends me a report if it finds any issues. It's an excellent resource for any website owner, as its free plans are great for finding the most common problems.
Well, I received a report a few days ago for my sites, thenwaexperience.com, and stellarhistory.com, and they both only had one problem. Page speed. They were loading too slowly. That's a direct result of the WordPress software.
I had planned to take thenwaexperience.com offline eventually, but I decided that this week was the week to make a move. I moved the few posts on the site over here since they were daily blog-type posts. They fit well here. Then I took the site down completely. So, I'm officially back down to three websites.
Stellarhistory.com has become my most visited site by far over the last few months, but it only has a little over 30 articles. For such a small site, it has been performing well. The only issue is that it gets slower every week. So I decided to bite the bullet, moved the FartDump software over to that domain, and did away with WordPress.
I HAD TO DO IT MANUALLY since I hadn't built a way to migrate the WordPress database to my structure. So I had to painstakingly move every post down to my software on my computer, make the site locally, then move it back up to the domain after I deleted the WordPress stuff. It was going relatively smoothly except for the category links. It took me about 15 hours of hair-pulling to figure out how to pull off that function. It was much trickier than I had anticipated. But I finally figured it out; I have to make those changes on FartDump, but I'll wait until next week to worry about that. The links work on this site for now, but the way I'm building them wasn't the best way to do it.
Since the links work here, I thought that part of the code was already good. I did not realize that it wasn't until I moved StellarHistory back up to its domain.
But even with the hiccups, I got the site back up and running in about two days. It doesn't look too pretty, as I didn't mess with the styles much. I was more worried about making sure the site works. It's more of an article-based site, so I'm not concerned about how it looks. I will spend next week working on that, though.
The effort was worth it as the site went from loading in 4 to 5 seconds with WordPress, which is nearly unusable, to half a second with my code.
I had planned to use the NWA Experience as my personal blog and development site like I'm doing here, but I have grown fond of the FartDump name. It's a universal name that's easier to remember. I always found myself having to explain what the other site's name was. But with FartDump, you get the idea with the name. This is my personal shit show, and you are all invited. I do plan to discuss my NWA Experience here as well. NWA stands for NorthWest Arkansas, I moved here a few years ago, and there is quite a bit to do here, so I will write about what's going on here and things of that nature.
But I will also discuss the website development as it progresses and just have some posts where I bitch about whatever is bugging me.
