“Hello World!” From The New Blog

As of writing this, it’s 12:48 PM, on the 16th of June 2023. I’ve spent a little over half a month working on what you’re seeing here now: Retrograde Road’s all-new blog, with all the necessary code for it handwritten entirely by me... and I honestly couldn’t be prouder of what I was able to achieve.

But why make a new blog in the first place, you may ask. Wasn’t the Wordpress blog perfectly fine?

Well... yeah, it was at first, but the more I used it, the more I realized just how limiting it was in terms of features and customizability, at least with what wasn’t locked behind a paywall. And so I figured that, rather than pay money for a service I was only using maybe a few times a year at best, I might as well start from scratch and create a framework exactly as I imagined it, with all the bells and whistles I could ever want.

Probably the main feature would be that each individual blog post now comes with its translations built-in, rather than requiring me to write a wholly separate post for each language I want to translate it to — even for just English and Japanese, that got pretty tedious to navigate. Now, if you change the site language in the top right of the page, it’ll change the language of all blog posts, too! (Except for the ones that don’t currently have a translation in that language, in which case they’ll default to English instead.)

Although, admittedly... that, along with the light/dark mode switching, may be the only real advantages this blog has over the old one. Which isn’t to say I can’t and won’t be implementing more stuff over time. This project is definitely still a work-in-progress, and it can only get better from here. Not to mention it’s made for some insanely invaluable coding practice. Honestly, ten years ago, I never would’ve thought I’d be making websites of this caliber in PHP.

So will the old blog go away, then? No, of course not. I can’t say I wasn’t considering copying all the posts to here, but I decided it’d probably be for the better to keep them where they are for archival purposes. You can still get to the old blog via the navigation menu above, so it’s not like I’m trying to bury it, either.

That said, if you’re reading this, let me know what you think! Obviously I’ve never written an entire blog before, so I’d greatly appreciate some good feedback.