The Great Recession of 2024
It has been four years since The Great Crash and recently the site ran into technical issues. It took about a week’s worth of evenings testing things, upgrading, downgrading, and sorting through debug logs to stabilize the site. I’m no professional coder, I’m just willing to figure things out. Thankfully we’re back to stability, hopefully for at least another four years.
In those same 4 years the site has become a bit, shall we say, bloated. With nearly 1000 pages, something like 7000 images, and all the accompanying text and media I’ve slowly climbed towards the limits of my server.
So, I made the tough decision to purposefully break my site a second time to make it leaner and meaner by deleting all the attached media. I’ve had it all backed up in triplicate so I figured I would reupload in a compressed format, saving myself several gigabytes of space. I knew it was a slim chance that bulk reuploading would relink everything properly and sure enough it didn’t. Instead I’ve been manually updating each page, averaging about 50/week and have made it well over halfway, but still have a couple hundred to go.
On top of that, a key plugin I use was deprecated, affecting about 250 pages. And, I’ve been feeling like the site’s look is outdated, even with a wealth of good info (and an even greater wealth of rough drafts) it’s still difficult to key into what’s relevant to you. I’m still stuck with WordPress for the time being but I’ve been playing around with some slightly different formats and have come up with proof of concept pages. Take a look and feel free to send me feedback, certainly a work in progress as I get more familiar with what the new tools can do, but lots of potential too!
Sleeping Giant State Park
Hike Chaplin, CT
2023
All this accumulates to what I’ll call the Great Recession for exploreCT which has been sapping me a bit when it comes to the bigger ideas, delivering more in the exploreCT+ Membership, and the steps towards achieving “Your Complete Guide to All Connecticut’s Outdoor Adventures”.
And then I go out into the woods, pass a historic quarry and village, climb up a steep rock staircase next to a waterfall, and see a bald eagle soar from an amazing overlook on a beautiful summer day. And I think gosh, beauty, history, and adventure are around every corner in this great state and I think you should see it too, so I better get back to work.
Until next time,
– Matt