The Books of Shallice

Brand New Website

2019-01-26

I've been a software developer for a few years now, but this website was originally designed long before I knew anything about web servers. I've been wanting to update it for quite awhile. I've been putting it off because I had a very specific idea of how I wanted it to work, and that would take time. (I won't bore you with the details, but it's a combination of how I prefer websites to look on the frontend and how I like servers to behave on the backend.)

My original primary motivation for this website was simply to move to a DigitalOcean droplet so that I could manage it more easily, most notably with https. Now, you may notice, there's no https. That may change in the future, but ironically, I realized that I don't really need it anymore, and never really did. This isn't a site where private data is being managed, and with this new version I don't even have a login anymore like I did with WordPress. Encryption would just be an extra something to manage without any real benefit.

This new website has a couple of advantages. It looks better on mobile (previous version was created before mobile websites were prevalent, so it was never mobile-optimized), and it's a lot more lightweight. (Though it does look more bare.)

Making entries is actually easier, too, since I just upload files directly to the server.

That's not to say that I dislike the previous site, though. It was perfect for me when I didn't know how to manage websites. I'm immensely grateful to my friend Adam for setting up a WordPress site for me at a time that I would have had no idea how to do so myself, but I'm now at a point in which I have the knowledge to do a decent job without the extra help of WordPress.

Bringing everything over to this site was a bit of a pain because most of the stories were originally written in a word processor. I've since grown to hate word processors and now write everything in straight html, but those older stories required some extra TLC to get working on this site. I think I got all of the special characters fixed, but, if not, I'll hopefully find them eventually.

I've got some more story ideas, but who knows when I'll get around to them. Hopefully soon.