Website New Look

Old Site

Old Ruby on Rails based website

It’s been a long time coming.  I have finally updated my website from the custom Ruby on Rails application that I wrote over 5 years ago.  At the time, I was doing a ton of Rails development and not much else.  Since then, I have still continued to use Rails, but most of my time has been spent on web design and learning new platforms and programming languages.  Like many other web developers, the site that is the most out of date is my own.  I have failed to do any updates to the site, other than new articles, in a few years.

For most of my new client websites I’m now using WordPress.  With it’s plethora of plugins, themes, and easy customization, it was a no-brainer for me to port my site over to it.  In the process, I get versioned posts, a responsive website, caching plugins, and a number of other small changes.  The only snag I have hit so far is finding an easy way to port all of the comments over from the old site without a TON of manual database work on my part.  So, for the time being, the only comments on the site are the new ones.  So, thank you to all of you that have been around long enough to see this site change throughout the years!

Zack

I love learning new things and trying out the latest technology.

2 Responses

  1. Savage702 says:

    Congrats on the new site! I have to say, I really liked your old design and the way the site worked. A little surprised you went from that to WordPress. On that note, years ago I went from a custom platform that a friend developed to have a more BBS feel to it since we all moved from BBS’s to the Net around the same time. I ended up dumping the database and bringing it all into Excel and doing a manual import and then matching post ID’s and doing a ton of Find & Replace work and macros to end up with some imports to bring over my comments. It was a lot of work and head scratching.

    I wish you luck with it, there was a lot of valuable and insightful information in the comments sections. Thanks as always for all your help, and your incredibly useful site.

    • Zack says:

      I appreciate the kind words. Unfortunately, the old site was not responsive, didn’t have versioning built into it, and was a bear to manage on a smartphone. I just don’t have the free time / desire to work on my own website anymore. I’d rather write articles : )

      I’m hoping someone offers a great solution to the comments, or I’m afraid they may go the way of the dodo. I would agree there were many great discussions there, that I would hate to lose.

      Thanks for your honest feedback and for following my site!

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