Welcome to The Future
For real this time
I know that I said in the-great-2026-redesign that this was the future of KyleDunkerley dotCom, but dear reader, one must remember that the future has this rather annoying tendency of becoming the past. And well… It seems that the past has arrived sooner than expected, and happened to pass us by! So now its time to look to the future yet again. And hopefully this time, the future stays with us a little longer, but who can tell these days?
So, dear reader, join me as we travel the path of what KyleDunkerley dotCom is, and what it isn’t, why it changed, why it didn’t, and everything in-between! But as always, the story of the future is written in the past. So, it time, yet again to…
Queue Flashback… Again!
Ever since I went down the road of creating my own WordPress theme, the writing was on the wall. I knew it, you knew it, in fact, even the birds and the bees knew it. As much as I tried to make it perfect, it just never quite got there. You see, I was building my theme on another theme. Every change was a fight between the parent theme and mine. Now, not to say it’s all bad. After all, it has flown closest to the sun than ever before, being as close to my original vision than anything previously. But, alas, I never could shake the feeling of connecting a refrigerator to a toaster and being happy about it.
Rather than fighting the very system I created, I decided now would be the perfect time to make a stand. A stand for digital sovereignty. A stand against big tech. (Well certain big tech). And a stand to reclaim my own data. So a stand I did take!
To most people, this won’t mean much, but to the few that get excited about these things, I present my stand: KyleDunkerley dotCom is WordPress no more! Queue the gasps. Roll on the sideways glances. Did he really? That mad man! And the cherry on top - you didn’t even know.
Goodbye WordPress
Thats right! The engine that powers over 70% of the world’s websites no longer has a hold on me. I have broken free from the shackles of the past, and embraced the future. A future in my own hands!
You see, while embedded in the world of WordPress, it never really felt like I owned my data. Every post I wrote, every album I critiqued, every digital thought I had, would fall into the big black box known as the WordPress database, locked from ever being released. In an effort to get around this, I tried many times to copy my data to OneNote, to Obsidian, to other database files, and eventually settled into a workflow just to keep my data mine first.
You see, dear reader, in order to feel like I controlled the digital ink I spilled, my workflow was a bunch of hoops to jump through. What hoops you ask. Oh, let me take you on a journey. I would go to OneNote first - my note taking app of choice - and pen my thoughts down there. Then I’d take the first draft and move it to the side, and pen the second draft. Sometimes this was enough. Other times it wouldn’t be, but I digress. Then once I was happy with said post, I’d copy-paste it right into the WordPress Draft Post window like some sort of caveman. This would inevitably strip all my painstakingly thought out formatting, my expert line breaks, and my cliff hanger poise… And dump it all as plain text. Oh the horror!
But the story is not over, oh no. I cannot publish plain text, thrown up on a page, like some rudimentary first year. What would my dear readers think, as they struggled through a single paragraph, 6,000 words long? No one would bother to finish any of my thoughts, let alone leave a comment. Which means I’d then need OneNote on one side of the screen, WordPress on the other, and do my damnest to match said formatting. For you see, Microsoft uses proprietary fonts, and other such stuff, while WordPress uses all open source and free fonts. So getting it 1:1 was never possible. It comes close, but never as nice as OneNote made it look.
But it doesn’t even end there. Oh, how I wish that it did. Then we could all get on with our lives, and get back to what ever it was we were doing before we decided to sit down to read this asinine offering from yours truly. For you see, once the post was in WordPress and published, I’d then notice a spelling or grammar issue that, by this time, had gotten past Microsoft’s spell checker, WordPress’s spell checker, my very own proof-reader in Simone, and myself… Surely one would think it would have earnt its place there, in the middle of the text, making a mockery of the whole endeavour. But no. I now had 2 or maybe more places to correct this, and hope I caught it before much more embarrassment was thrust upon my family name.
All this to say, it was a bad system. A serviceable system that serviced me for the better part of two decades. But, none the less, not a good system. Which leads me to this stand on which I took. The stand of…
Owning Your Data
Thats right. It’s now time to take a stand, and own my own data. And by that I mean, I hold the masters of my blog posts. Not the copies, not the cheap knock offs. The orginal and best ones. The ones before the editing. The ones that have yet to see any flourish of the pen. The ones that shall forever be confined to the drafts folder. And I did all this because, should the internet be shut off tomorrow, or more likely, the government would have me disappeared, those closest to me will have my writings to go on. And maybe one day, they too, could feed my myriad of writings into an LLM like ChatGPT and pretend I am still alive. Isn’t the future wonderful?
But, and to be really serious for a second, I am tired of paying for the privilege of companies locking my very own information away, held hostage, in an effort to get me to pony up for yet another month of accessing my very own stuff. While WordPress doesn’t do this unless you host with them, their very system of posts going into a database in which extracting them is quite painful, ruffled my feathers. Consider me ruffled. Ruffled enough to do something about it.
So I did. I did do something about this. I completely rebuilt my website from the ground up.
Take The Best
Building my site from the ground up allowed me the benefits of a few things. One - I could take the best parts of my site and keep it, or even improve it, and two - I could ditch the rest. All the crud of WordPress to WordPress installs, the many different domain names, the weird formatting from Windows Live Writer (which still existed in some of my posts!). In fact, the WordPress database was so full of history, that it was over 2 gigs big! For a site like mine that had a few photos here and there, some random words imparting timeless wisdom, and maybe a very slick animation or two, thats way too big. My new site is les than 400MB. Including the uncompressed photos!
And as Tina Turna once sang…
What’s Size Gotta To Do With It?
You see - a small site is fast. Blick, and its loaded. Look away, and a post has appeared. You could be in the middle of the jungle, with one bar of 2G signal, and bam! my site has loaded. Try that on WordPress, and you’ll still be waiting for the first picture to be shown as you slowly realise the natives are not introducing you to a new way to steam your pores when they start chopping up the veggies and adding it to your very symmetrical bath…
Taking control allows me to dictate just how big the site it, how much it animates, what the themes look like down to the font size and colour. Oh, and because I can write my posts in markdown (for the non-techy people its this cool format that’s like plain text, but better), it means that I can use anything to blog. Open up Notepad on Windows - I can blog there with all my formatting and headings in place. Get tired of writing PowerShell code in Visual Studio Code? Now I can open a new .md file and write a blogpost. Only have my phone with me? Fire up Apple Notes and write a fortyfive hundred word takedown on the many ways in which a train can move side to side along a typical spot of track. Its all possible.
And Markdown files are small. Like really small. Open NotePad. Do it. Right now. Type your name. Make it bold (yes, NotePad can do that now). Save it on your desktop. Look at its size. Not even 1 kilobyte, I suspect. And it takes one thousand of those little guys to make up one megabyte! See! Do you see now? Do you see the power of plain text? Or is it just me?
Oh well, I suspect if that did get you excited, then you’d have told me by now. And if it didn’t then this whole section will be filed into the filler episode portion of the blog post…
So, now that you know the backstory, now that you’ve peaked behind the curtin, allow me to formally introduce you to
The New KyleDunkerley dotCom
Hello. Hi. Hows it going? While it may look very similar, with just a fresh coat of paint, the changes go way beyond skin deep. Its a new way of thinking, a new way of owning my content, and a new way to blog. From here on out, I control 99% of it. The only thing beyond my control is the hosting. Thanks to Fred, this website has a home on the internet. Without him, I probably wouldn’t have taken such a drastic move, and instead spent the next 10 years fighting with WordPress.
Lets do a brief introduction. By talking about whats missing first. Because when someone loses a bunch of weight, thats the first thing you notice. You know, that I know, so don’t pretend you don’t. Technology and Investing as subjects are gone. Goodbye. So are comments. They’ve also taken a hike. I wasn’t getting much joy from them and honestly, they were outdated and old. Not the comments. The comments have gone away because I never liked the way they looked. They always seemed like a desperate attempt to garner some sort of interaction. So now, you dear reader, can read, and not have to think of some witty reply. Because lets be honest, it probably wasn’t as witty as it sounded in your head anyways. And only one of us here is a writer after all…
The award for the biggest glow up goes to… My Music Reviews. They have stepped up their game, taken on a whole new personality (in looks, not in content - lets not get too excited) and really earned their place on my site. Give them a spin, see what I mean. Travel also got some really features to help you remember where in the journey you are. Stories and poems now behave like stories and poems. Theres a lot of little easter eggs. From the search to the album art. See if you can spot them.
But the one I am most proud of - the site’s new default theme - Twilight. It took a long time to really get the look and feel of this just right. I am super happy with how it turned out. Give it a spin, see what you think. If you do not feel 100% more calm using this theme, then let me know in the comments. Ah, I can already sense a lack of comments, so it must be working.
So hello. Welcome back. KyleDunkerley dotCom is now how I want it to be. For now at least. I hope you like it. I know I do.
Your humble servant,
Kyle