I just made a pretty significant update to the site’s main navigation. Finally, I am using a more mobile-friendly menu system in which the various depths slide left and right as you drill down. This article about WordPress menu walkers was extremely helpful in getting all this to work correctly.

I probably should add a bunch of accessibility attributes, but that is a bit much for now. I’m just shocked the thing works.

My next big change was to clean-up and consolidate my CSS so that I could use a single template to render the various content types on this site. In the process I have re-added a few pages that I had created in Views back on the old Drupal version of this site. Art and Retro-Computing feeds are back. Many of the reviews pages now have alternate views.

I fixed a bunch of little details all over the place and have made it so my artworks exist apart from my posts (even though they are in this main home page feed). The final change which I have yet to get to is making the navigation more mobile friendly. I never look at the Web on my phone, so this is low-priority for me.

My reason for moving away from Drupal was my general disappointment with Drupal 8. Nothing ever seemed to work exactly right. I’d make a few changes on the back-end and the site would unbeknownst to me be put in maintenance mode. Several key plugins withered on the vine and stopped working. The built in WYSIWYG editor was absolute garbage. And the worst part of it all was the horrifically user unfriendly update process. There are modules that require Composer to install and update and others that are always in pre-release dev states. No thanks. After a decade of loyal advocacy and usage, it was time to bid Drupal farewell.

I have built a couple WordPress sites for work this year and now feel much more capable in this system. The main disadvantage of WordPress is its lack of a Views plugin. If you want to get creative with outputting data, you need to dive in to .PHP files and WP_Query() loops. There’s a massive user base, so finding help on the Internet is fairly easy and, once you understand the basics, you get an idea of how to accomplish tasks.

As I type this, I am prepping to launch the site. Hopefully all will go well. Having never run a WordPress site with comments enabled I worry that I will find myself buried in comment spam.

Still, there is a lot to like about the new system. I will soon post the gory details of my migration experience, but, in the meantime, let’s hope this works and that I am not swamped with comment spam.

However, yesterday I started to get all sorts of notifications of new comments in my inbox regarding this post. I went and checked my analytics account:

This could graph could mean one of two things: anthropogenic global warming is real and we are all on the cusp of the apocalypse, or someone on the Internet with many more readers than me linked to my page. Fortunately it was latter. I was able to back track to find out where all these hits were coming from:

PJTV’s Stephen Green (a.k.a. Vodkapundit) featured the post on his weekly show, The Week in Blogs. In fact, he referred to it as “The Photoshop of Week” and “The Blog of the Week.” Also (and I’m not sure if this came first) I was also linked on Glenn Reynold’s mighty Instapundit blog!

In the immortal words of Three Stoned Men, “Smells Like the Big Time!” Ok, time to check my Google Adsense account and see all that money I raked in:

Dammit.

In addition to this new address, The Pages of Fun have been completely rebuilt from the ground up using a fancy content management system called Drupal. I’ve tried to keep the look and feel of the site as close to the previous version as possible. The most noticeable change is that the layout has gotten wider to accommodate for all of the content management tools and navigation elements of Drupal. You may also notice you favorite page is gone. I tried to move everything over, but a couple things got lost in the move. But don’t fret. Now the site is searchable!

Design tweaks aside, the new system will make updating my site so much easier for me. That MAY mean more frequent updates, and, after a decade of resisting, this site might officially become a blog! Like other bloggy sites, I now have opened areas for visitor’s comments—that could be a mixed blessing. We’ll see how many spazzes feel the need to chime in.

One more thing. I now have a proper rss feed. I will be glad to never have to hand-code XML again. Please go to rss.xml and subscribe to stay on top of the latest additions to the site.

Another incremental update to the theme. This time it’s mostly behind-the-scenes changes (I learned how to program styles in SASS). But there are a couple of minor tweaks to form items and some new CSS3 effects.

Then in 2019 I decided to upgrade to Drupal 8. Here’s what the site looked like just before I made the switch:

This is yet another iteration of the previous design. By 2011 I had a much better understanding of how templating worked in Drupal and made a somewhat slicker template that adhered to 960 grid-style layout. Sometime during this period I did an upgrade to Drupal 7 and had to reworked the layout to be compatible with 7. In the process I made the site mobile-friendly with a responsive design.

Sometime during 2007 I switched from hand-coding my web site to using the Drupal CMS system. I adopted my static template to the Drupal system.

This was one of the longest running look ‘n’ feels for the Pages o’ Fun. This one had a few nice little Flash illustrations on the side.

And here are the Flash animations that were in the left gutter:

And then there was this thing that was hidden in the header strip: