Every so often I’ll get an email from the app that runs on my websites, telling me that other apps need to be updated or have been automatically updated.
Thing is, this is the only web site I do things with these days.
I’ve a multi-user/network installation somewhere, so I can test out themes and other changes without affecting the live site. And I’ve the Family Tree site as well. But really, my last 15-and-a-half years have been here. With a bit of Soviet-style editing of previous posts, of course. Plus my sister’s site, which needs an update.
So I’ve decided to junk the Family Tree site.
I still think it was a good idea, but I never really broke the back of uploading all of the content. It was supposed to be ‘the film of the book’; cut down the number of people on there by leaving out details for all of the children who died very young, and add in some photos of people to make it a bit more visual. Bringing the tree to life, in a way.
That was a bit silly as there aren’t many – any – photos of people earlier than the mid-1930. My great-great-great grandfather, William Taylor, died in 1843. The first recognisably modern photograph was taken in 1829 (it had an eight-hour exposure). Short exposure portrait photography took its time getting around the Empire, so I’ve nothing older than grandparents and not even their siblings.
I’m in two minds about the network site as well. It would be easier to create a new WordPress installation on a subdomain for the two remaining sites, linked to the same database.
There’s also the undeniable fact that WordPress itself is not what it was. It’s much less friendly to hobbyists like me now that we have Gutenberg and blocks which require more knowledge of Javascript than I ever had.
In a way it feels like the end of an era; but nothing is every truly lost these days; I revived the old Leeds United/Carnegie Ladies FC site for testing purposes. A lot of the content will be backed up to by storage drive. And who knows – it might even be archived by archive.org.
But it’s getting harder to keep track of everything anyway; there’s a site for the family tree that uses php to generate a site ‘on the fly’ and I don’t have external, paying customers any more. Not to mention that the plan I’m on with Nativespace is crap. As are they. I would have moved last year but the company I chose wanted to see my passport for verification purposes (I think not).
Time, then, to let go. And, in all probability, find something new to get stuck in to!
Postscript. We all know I’m going to have another go at the Family Tree site, don’t we?