Upgrades, people. Upgrades.
June 11, 2022
So I went quiet yet again for a bit. I've just been pretty busy. Mainly with a couple of different projects.
I spent some time updating Tappr to have a proper onboarding flow, which shows the player how to play the game. At the same time, adding many different features such as Achievements, a basic profile, and the ability to share their high scores with their friends.
I've also been working on updates to my site. But not this site. A brand new site! Currently live over at https://beta.rhyce.dev. This new site is fully built by me and should run much faster than this one. I've shown my distaste for WordPress before so I'm glad to be finally moving away from it.
WordPress is to me what sand is to Anakin. It's coarse and rough and irritating and it gets everywhere.
The new site will run on Next.js and it will be soft, and smooth.
Memes aside though, I'm excited about the transition. I tend to look at the site performance and notice a lot of the loading times on WordPress are things that are out of my control, mainly due to my lack of ability to fix it. Most of the loading time comes down to big libraries needing to be downloaded to the user's computer. I have tried to remove these libraries as they aren't used on my site but it downloads them anyway.
Some things are related to WordPress itself and other things are down to the theme. Hestia is my theme of choice as it's very nice looking and has good integrations with Elementor, which is the page-builder I use. One of the many problems is the plugins themselves, like the top bar plugin I'm using. I assume its positioning is a bug in my Hestia but it shows in a different place on the home page than it does on other pages. WordPress is a blogging platform, first and foremost. Any other tasks are secondary.
Overall, the move away from WordPress will mean I can make a much more dynamic platform. I want to be able to embed YouTube videos in a fully custom way? Boom. Done. I want to pull data from an external API and have the feature ready within minutes? Boom. Done.
This transition will take time as I'll have to find a way to convert the WordPress database and posts to my system, which will be fun, but life...finds a way.