You know how you tell yourself you'll take a break, but before you know it, you're back in the thick of things, knee-deep in code? That was me yesterday. I promised myself a few days off from working on the website, but here I am again, diving right back into it. It's the kind of pull you can’t resist, like scratching an itch that only gets worse the more you mess with it.
I finally got the homepage looking halfway decent. If you've ever seen a WordPress blog, it might feel familiar, and that’s intentional. I’ve always liked WordPress—it’s feature-packed, but also a bit bloated. The goal for my site is to capture the good stuff about WordPress without the excess weight.
At first, I considered running a stripped-down version of WordPress, using only the features I needed. But in the end, I decided to take the long way around and start from scratch. There’s something satisfying about knowing every line of code on your site, like it’s your own little creation. No shortcuts, no borrowed solutions—just clean, purposeful code.
Editing the site live used to be a nerve-wracking experience. Every time I hit "save," I’d brace for the possibility of crashing the whole thing. Now? I’ve relaxed a bit. The site doesn’t get much traffic yet, so the stakes aren’t exactly high. If it goes down, no one really notices—except me, of course. It's like a small tree falling in the vast, empty forest of the internet.
I’ve thought about adopting a more professional approach—working on the site locally, testing everything, and then pushing updates in neat little batches. It’s a solid plan, but the process seems tedious right now. For now, I’m sticking with live edits, even though it’s a bit reckless.
Visual Studio has become my go-to tool when I need to clean up the mess I’ve made. After a long session of coding, my work tends to look more like a puzzle than a polished project. But a quick round in Visual Studio fixes that, formatting everything back to something that resembles order. It’s saved me more than a few headaches, especially when DreamHost—while great—doesn't offer support for cleaning up syntax. Visual Studio picks up the slack.
Now that I’ve got three websites up and running, I’m thinking more seriously about getting things set up the right way from the start. It’s easier to do it now than to wait until my sites are more complex. That’s the long-term goal—to streamline everything, making it easier to manage in the future. But for now, I’m going to keep pushing forward, taking on one challenge at a time, and enjoying the process.
