Impending Site Revamp

Me First and the Gimme Gimmes – “Mona Lisa”

I’m feeling the urge to completely re-do my site. I think about it every once in a while, but since Trinity talked about it the other day, it reminded me that I should probably re-vamp my site in some way.

I actually started this process a few weeks ago by closing down all of the fanlistings I own. Only one was ever very popular, and I had so many database problems with it that I felt horrible about keeping it going since most of the members were lost. I think someone with more time could do a far better job. My layouts for that one always sucked too, that made me sad. So I did away with all of them. I’m not sure I’ll continue to join fanlistings, but I certainly won’t own any. Except maybe the Type O Negative one, if that ever becomes available.

There are several pages/sections that I know I haven’t updated in months, maybe even years. My about me page has been generally the same (the same format, at least) since I was 14. I’m nearing 21, and it seems time for a change. I still can’t fathom giving my entire site over to WordPress, as much as I love it. I don’t like giving a CMS that much authority over my site. However, if I’m planning to drastically reduce the number of pages on my site, why not just give it over to WP? I could at least officially use themes then. Right now I’ve got my site skinned (no other skins are presently available due to my not wanting them to be :P) but for my index page, I just commented out the header and footer for WP and put the link to my skinned header and footer files in there. My default theme is useless as far as themes go. It just does what I want it to do, hence why the RSS feed is missing on my site – I have it commented out.

I’m not good enough with PHP to figure out how to get it to detect what page it’s on. For instance, what if I wanted the RSS feed link only on the index page, but no other pages? How do I set that up in my header? I’d want PHP to say “if you’re on the index, throw in the RSS link. If not, don’t.” It seems easy enough, but how do you make it realize that it is on the index? That’s the part that I don’t get.

Anyway, maybe over Christmas break, I’ll make a new layout and completely re-do the site. There’s no way I can get it done before then – I just have too much going on. But I’ll make a new layout and get rid of a bunch of sections and condense others. Does anybody even ever read the rest of my site? I have this fantastic section on all the concerts I’ve been to, including reviews of nearly all of them. I basically quit updating that section when I added my journal (actually, that’s when I quit updating everything, it seems) but I’m curious if that was ever interesting to anybody but me. I like having it there as a way to remember what happened, because I know if I got rid of it, I’d probably never remember that I went to a concert with Amon Amarth, Nile, and Vader all by myself when I first moved to Portland.

It’s a tough decision for me since I’m such a packrat. I can’t bear to throw anything away, because WHAT IF I NEED IT SOMEDAY? It may stem from my grandmother being the sort of person that throws everything out, but it just makes me nervous because I know if I do, a day will come that I will need it and then I won’t have it. I feel the same way about my website, but I do acknowledge that something needs to be done. And like I said, it wouldn’t be for another couple of months at least, but at least I’m thinking about it.

I guess what I’m wondering is, would anybody miss it?

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