I'm a very impatient person. The plan was to wait a few months until the code on FartDump was more robust before moving the software to my other sites, but I couldn't wait.
I use a site called ahrefs.com to crawl my websites and find issues like broken links. It crawls my sites weekly and sends a report if it finds any problems. It's an excellent resource, especially with its free plans for common issues.
A few days ago, I received reports for my sites, thenwaexperience.com and stellarhistory.com. They both had one problem: page speed. They were loading too slowly, a direct result of the WordPress software.
I had planned to eventually take thenwaexperience.com offline, but I decided to do it this week. I moved the few posts on the site over here since they were daily blog-type posts that fit well. Then I took the site down completely, bringing my total back to three websites.
Stellarhistory.com has become my most visited site over the last few months, with just over 30 articles. Despite its small size, it has been performing well, but it gets slower every week. So, I decided to bite the bullet, moved the FartDump software over to that domain, and ditched WordPress.
I had to do it manually since I hadn't built a way to migrate the WordPress database to my structure. I painstakingly moved every post to my software on my computer, made the site locally, then moved it back up to the domain after deleting the WordPress setup. The process was relatively smooth except for the category links, which took about 15 hours to figure out. But I finally did, and I'll make those changes on FartDump next week. The links work on this site for now, though the way I built them wasn't the best.
Despite the hiccups, I got the site back up and running in about two days. It doesn't look too pretty, as I focused on functionality over style. I'll work on the aesthetics next week. The effort was worth it, as the site went from loading in 4-5 seconds with WordPress to half a second with my code.
I had planned to use the NWA Experience as my personal blog and development site, but I have grown fond of the FartDump name. It's a universal, easy-to-remember name. I often had to explain the other site's name, but with FartDump, the name says it all. This is my personal shit show, and you are all invited. I plan to discuss my NWA Experience here as well. NWA stands for NorthWest Arkansas. I moved here a few years ago, and there's a lot to do, so I'll write about what's happening here.
I'll also discuss website development and vent about whatever is bugging me.
