WordPress is awesome! It’s a badass CMS, but damn, is it bloated! I got back into building websites about two years ago and decided to give WordPress a spin. I had never used it before, preferring to build sites myself. But with WordPress, you can focus on content without needing coding experience. I was amazed at its versatility. I quickly began adding plugins, and before long, I was buying themes and premium plugins. But that should have been my first red flag.
The admin panel, while dated, was nice to use, and I loved the Gutenberg editor. However, it quickly became cluttered with ads from plugins urging me to upgrade to their premium versions. This was increasingly frustrating, distracting me from content creation and focusing instead on plugins and theme settings to get the site looking right.
After about a year of this, I’d had enough. While no pro, I know enough HTML, PHP, and JavaScript to make my own CMS—or so I thought. I decided to use FartDump as a staging area to work on a custom CMS live since I had virtually no traffic, thanks to Facebook constantly killing my exposure on the FartDump Facebook page.
It took about a day to realize I needed help. Luckily, I’d been using ChatGPT to proofread articles on Wisedocks.com. Now, ChatGPT writes the entire articles there since I primarily use the website for quote images and just need filler words around them. It’s a happy marriage.
It hadn’t occurred to me that ChatGPT is AMAZING with code writing. If you already understand basic coding, ChatGPT is great at helping make your code work when you get stuck. After about a month of working on FartDump in my spare time, I had a fairly stable CMS. I moved the software over to StellarHistory.com. The move was premature, but that website was so bogged down by WordPress that it took about 7 seconds to load. After switching to my CMS, that dropped to 2 seconds because my CMS is barebones and only has code that’s being used.
My source code went from over 300,000 lines to under 20,000. It’s a huge improvement. One year later, and this site, as well as StellarHistory, are still fast as hell! StellarHistory is designed to make money from ads, so it has slowed a bit as I plastered ads everywhere. No popups, though—I hate popups with a passion!
Wisedocks.com had around 130 articles that I didn’t want to move manually, so I planned to create a script to move all the articles. But then I bought Farming Simulator 22 and became so hooked on the game that I spent over 50 hours a week playing, neglecting all my websites for the past year. Finally, about a month ago, I burned out on FS22 and decided to get back to the websites.
I decided to forgo migrating the existing articles and took down Wisedocks entirely, installed my custom CMS, and start slowly readding the articles one at a time and see what happens.
I’m independently working on all three sites, so the once custom CMS has almost turned into three separate CMSs. It’s not the best way, but I don’t want to turn my custom CMS into another bloated system. I’d prefer each site to have just the code it needs to run, nothing more. They all still look very similar in layout but the backend is quite different amongst the three.
I currently have four websites going: the three I’ve been discussing and one private one I’m developing for my personal use. It’s a shopping list web app that also has a recipe book where you can add your own recipes. If you want to cook a certain recipe, you can go to that recipe and add some or all of the ingredients to your shopping list, making shopping much easier.
I've thought about making that site public so that other people can use it and I may in the future but for now I'll keep it to myself.
So, while WordPress reignited my love for working on websites, it also pushed me into building my own sites from the ground up and for that I tip my hat to them.
