New Host

New host, refreshed site!

First of all, welcome to my new site! It took me so long to get everything set up, because I had to convert all of my reviews. I wanted to start off on a new host with an actual backend, which meant a database for all of my reviews and diary entries. Converting all of my reviews was a struggle because I had to make them uniform, and then convert them into markdown. Because of this I decided to once again start fresh with my diary. This time, I will provide an actual archive to all of my old entries though.

I decided to go with NearlyFreeSpeech for the host, so I had to restructure my folders, and it took a while do get everything right.

Also... I said my new site will be more colorful, but I ended up settling for a simple palette once again. I can't help myself, 3 colors is max that my brain can handle. I'm not too happy with the layout, I'm constantly jumping between wanting something extremely minimalistic but then thinking that it doesn't look presentable enough, or that it implies I actually don't know how to make a good site, or that I don't like making websites. I don't know why I get self conscious over it, I enjoy what I enjoy! But now that I have an actual backend and don't have to think about that anymore, maybe I can play around with my site a bit more? Right right..

I have changed the way reviews and diary entries work, after a lot of thinking of the best way to present both. I thought that maybe my diary.php page could display the latest entry, along with all others, but I'm not sure yet. It would require less clicking for someone that just wants to read the latest entry, but so far I like it this way. I like having all these tabs to sort through, along with a feature to sort by date and alphabetically. The latter isn't really necessary for diary entries though so I removed it. I'm also planning on having some kind of a comment feature for my reviews maybe? And adding a chatbox/guestbook, either in index or my diary page. The site is still incredibly unfinished at the point of writing, and it'll take me ages to convert and migrate everything. I've been thinking of this upgrade for such a long time, I'm glad I finally went through with it.

If you're wondering why I moved, there's no huge reason behind it. I mostly got tired of all of my reviews and diary entries being manual entry. Having a database greatly simplifies the process, especially if I can just run a command and automatically update everything, along with generating rss.