2016: Time for another 47ronin.com website reboot

After all these years, I haven’t figured out a focus.

What is this, the fifth… or sixth rework of my website? I’ve lost track. One thing’s certain.

After all these years, I haven’t figured out a focus.

47ronin.com must grow up… and I, along with it

I’ve carefully thought about seven key categories and a plethora of tags. Yet, many posts later I want to scrap it all and start over.

Simplification, then clarification. Efficiency, then future-proofing. Somehow these schools of thought have gone hand-in-hand, then turned around and destroyed my online “home.”

I want to talk about everything but keep the categories slim —but use a lot of tags… and simplify —don’t forget about SEO! But content is king… but content is hard. Just spill your thoughts… but I need to present it in a well-reasoned, detail-oriented presentation —but keep it simple!

Before I can type a single thought, the committee in my head has already argued about direction, design, and architecture; such that I can’t even… I CAN’T EVEN.

Before this becomes an endless rant about my perplexing thought process, I present this website’s 2016 plan.

Changes to 47ronin.com in 2016:

• Yet-another redesign: Will likely be a static Twitter Bootstrap front-end with a blog to back it up. I’ll either use a theme or write it myself. I just want to keep it dynamic without a lot of hassle.
• Switch from Apache to NGINX: Why? Because it’s badass, fast, and different. That is pretty much why I do a lot things!
• Upgrade to PHP7: Why? See above. Key thing here is speed… and I love tinkering for performance. It’s either PHP7 or HHVM (which seems so much more interesting but magnitudes more complex from a deploy-from-scratch standpoint).
• Switch from MySQL to MariaDB: Oracle owning MySQL is as scary a thought as Microsoft owning Ubuntu… I don’t see a true open source future there —should I just redeploy from a brand new Amazon EC2 appliance or upgrade everything myself? Hmmm…
• Full-bore switch to oEmbed. I wanted this to be the “thing” years back but the technology and content weren’t in place for it to be viable. In 2016 all the players and pieces are in use, such that I can finally stop using Embedly on 47ronin.com (sorry guys, you were great for a long while).
• Images in every post: Shouldn’t be a problem but I’ll need to think about how Asides are handled (default pics?) Twitter Cards better be robust in this scenario. Hopefully WordPress 4.4 has taken care of this…
• Responsive imagery/video AND adaptive images: WordPress does responsive out of the box but adaptive may need a plugin. Who the heck wants to download a full-res image published to 47ronin.com, taken from an iPhone 6s+, on a non-Retina mobile device over 3G?
• Tie-in with my 47ronin GitHub repository: I’ll figure out an elegant way to publish updates here.
• Emphasis on writing… every day twice a week: Holy shit. I just challenged myself. CHALLENGE ACCEPTED.

View post on imgur.com