Optimizing images for this website is something I'm constantly working on but find challenging to implement. The quest for running a fast website is almost an obsession. I guess we all have our quirks about needing things to be just a certain way. Mine is with my websites. The smallest thing will keep me occupied all day to make it look just right. Perfection isn't obtainable, but if you keep pursuing it, then excellence often is.
A few months ago, I decided to start converting all of the images I use across all of my websites to WebP format to decrease the size on the servers. I built a WebP image converter online tool into all of my forms for uploading images. However, I still needed to convert all of the old images, so I created an image converter to do just that. This tool allows you to convert images to WebP format easily. It works pretty well, so I thought, "Why not share it with everyone else?"
I may add some other useful tools later on, so I placed a tools tab in the menu if you are on PC. For mobile users, I added it to the bottom of the dropdown menu. This tool is designed to help with optimizing website images for better performance. While I'm sure someone will figure out how to mess it up, it's been working great for me over the past few months. I did place some limits on file types and a file size limit of 5 MB. If you find the tool useful and want to resize your large images to a more respectable size, let me know, and I may increase that limit. You can try it out here.
I've been tinkering around with building a desktop weather app. It's very basic in function but looks nice. There are some things that I need to implement to make it user-friendly for those who aren't very tech-savvy. If I ever get around to getting it to a good state, I may add it to the website for download. Having a user-friendly weather widget for the desktop is handy for quick access to weather and time information. There are always no fewer than two monitors in front of me at all times, and I like to have the weather and the time within a glance. That's probably because I'm getting old. It doesn't take much to make me happy.
I've spent most of my day stomping out bugs across all four of my websites and adding some quotes to Wisedocks. There's still a long way to go before I get them all fully operational again, but slowly but surely, they are coming back online. It feels somewhat discouraging, though, as they were up for over a year with little fanfare. However, I'm approaching things differently this time by telling stories about the people behind the quotes, which I hope will yield a different result.
One of the key changes I'm implementing is focusing on storytelling. Instead of just posting quotes, I'm delving into the lives and backgrounds of the individuals who made these quotes. By providing context and narratives, I'm aiming to create a more engaging and meaningful experience for my visitors. This approach should not only attract more traffic but also encourage visitors to spend more time on the site, exploring the stories and learning more about the personalities behind the words.
The effort seems to be paying off already, as traffic is slowly returning to the site from the few articles that have been indexed this week. It's encouraging to see even a small uptick in visitors, which suggests that the new strategy might be working. I’m optimistic that this focus on storytelling will resonate more with the audience and bring a sustained increase in engagement and traffic.
Fingers crossed that this new approach will breathe new life into the websites and attract the attention they deserve. It’s been a challenging but rewarding process, and I’m hopeful that all this hard work will ultimately pay off.
