Compusition

Grand Reopening

I finally relaunched this website with a new hosting provider. There are a ton of changes that are going to help me grow this site the way I always wanted.

For the technically inclined, here's some details:

• I moved from GoDaddy to Heroku for hosting and DNSimple for the domain name. These services are much easier for me to use, and allow me to do things I couldn't on GoDaddy.
• The site was ported from Drupal/PHP to Ruby on Rails.
• The site is no longer a CMS (content management system). It's a "full on" web site built from the ground up to work the way I want.
• I now add & modify site content with well-organized HTML template files in an IDE. I test all my changes on my computer, and then deploy them to the server in one easy step. Back on Drupal, I used to type a subset of allowed HTML into a textarea in my browser. It was... horrible... *shudder*
• Most audio/visual content is now hosted on Amazon S3, which should help keep costs down and allow the site to scale up better (read: the site should be faster).
• The look & feel of the site was redesigned and is now mobile optimized. So if you're on a phone or tablet, welcome! Some features of the site that previously didn't work on mobile have been updated for mobile compatibility.
• All my changes are version controlled and backed up on github.

Doing all this was a ton of work that ended up literally taking me years because I didn't have the time or motivation to make progress very often. It's a huge relief to have this behind me.

Anyway... the important thing is it will be much more pleasant for me to build on this site, and so I will actually do it now. I've done a lot of computer/composition side projects the last few years and I looking forward to sharing info about them here.