10th Year Blogiversary!
Posted on January 16, 2024 by Aywren
As of today, this blog is a decade old! I’ve been blogging far longer than 10 years – I developed a number of blogs before this. This is just the one that has stood the test of time. But even then, it’s gone through a number of developments.
I launched this blog in 2014 at a self-hosted WordPress using my Sygnus.org domain. I really wanted to do something with that domain at the time, as I’d always set out to create a hub of some sort using it. Today, it houses Sygnus Star, which has become a hub for all of my FFIV sites and projects instead.
When this blog launched, it was called “Sygnus.org” and eventually transitioned to the title “Clean Casuals.”
It seems that sometime during late 2015, I moved the blog off of Sygnus and to a new domain – Aywren.com. I didn’t keep good documentation on this, but I can see where I mentioned it in my 2016 blogiversary post.
In November of 2019, I moved this blog to WordPress.com. I was struggling with a lot of problems hosting it at Host Gator – the amount of resources it was taking up was outgrowing my hosting plan, and I was looking for something that would be cost effective while not leaving me to deal with technical issues.
WordPress.com was a great choice at the time, and I was happy there for a good long while. While at WordPress.com, the blog was once more rebranded to a “Gaming and Geek” blog.
I was absolutely content and pro WordPress.com until things started to change in early 2022. I had no intention on moving away until they started doing crazy things like shifting around their plans and their price points. I’ve discussed this more than enough in the past, but needless to say, I started considering alternatives to hosting on WordPress.com.
Summer of 2022, I made the leap to this self-hosted, self-coded, static HTML website. That’s when it was once again rebranded to “Aywren’s Nook.”
It was a lot of work to clean up and move all the content from WordPress to HTML, a project I finally finished in August of last year. It had been my goal to complete this before this 10th blogiversary rolled around this year, and I was able to do it!
Back in December, I wrote an update about all the changes and additions I made to this blog in 2023. I’ll reiterate here just for the sake of keeping it all documented:
- Creating the Microblog section and moving content from other sources there
- Creating new sections in the Shrine area, namely BDO Horses and Breyer Horses
- Completely revamping the Diamond Painting section to fit the theme of the site
- Organizing posts by topic and maintaining a new Topics section alongside yearly Categories
- Creating a new Commonplace Book section to reflect things I’m reading and thinking about
Earlier, I also brought my Uke and Fiddle webesites under the same domain, which consolidated all of my blogs in one place. I remain pleased with how everything turned out in the end. While it was a big project with a lot of hours, I still feel it was worth it. 10/10 - would do it all over again.
With all this behind me, this year I’m fully focused on getting back into my blogging groove again. It might not be every day, but I’m trying to blog more often, and return to the kind of content I used to write, even back in the first year of launch – which included a lot of my grappling with my Steam backlog. I guess some things never change. : )
For those who have been along for the ride all these years, thanks for every read, every comment, and every social media chat we’ve had. May there be many more years to come!