The time had come. I desperately needed to update my website.
Like “a cobbler with bad shoes” or “an accountant with an unbalanced checkbook” kind of needing to update my website.
It was bad enough that the last time I had posted to my blog was years old — five years now — and the theme was even older.
(Thank God for Genesis. That’s one rock-solid framework!)
But why was it taking me so long?
Try, Try (And Try Some More) Again
For a few years, I started to redesign this personal website of mine.
I hopped between a few different themes on a local install and worked up a couple of designs, but nothing ever really took off.
And then I decided to move off Instagram. Something about owning your content, not giving into “The Machine,” or something of that sort.
Remember, it’s been a while.
So I exported all of my stuff.
My plan was to get it all into my personal website and sperate my Instagram-y images from my ongoing #ericsbeertour.
Importing it was easy. WP All Import works like a champ!
It was deciding how to display the content that things began to get tricky. I mean, it wasn’t really tricky — I just overthought everything about it.
Part of me wanted to take a shortcut and use something like Toolset. In fact, I used one of my previous designs and built everything out using Toolset.
But I have a thing for keeping things as close to “The WordPress Way” as possible, so back to square one.
Should I use Genesis again? Astra? GeneratePress?
Not everything reacts to Custom Post Types the same and requires more tooling, so maybe I should build a theme from scratch using something like Pinegrow? Or just go with underscores?
Because I wasn’t putting a high priority on things, all of this played out over the months as I would come back to it every once and a while.
And then Full Site Editing popped up.
Maybe I should wait until FSE matures!?!
It Got Frosty
This past Spring I was talking with Darrell Vesterfelt about various things and Genesis came up as a topic of conversation. We reminisced about how well websites we had built using Genesis had aged so well and hadn’t broken, despite all the big changes WordPress core had made over the last decade.
That was it. I had to go back to Genesis.
Around this same time, Brian Gardner had announced a new Genesis child theme called Frost that was designed to lean into Full Site Editing.
I immediately signed up for the beta and attended some cool Zoom meetings to hear more about it from Brian himself, so as soon as I could buy Frost, I did.
For those who were following Frost early on recall, Brain made a shift to WP Engine, and Frost went with it.
Refunds were made.
Now what?
The Stars Aligned
This past July (2022) Sam Munoz hosted a meet-up that discussed Full Site Editing and Custom Blocks.
It had been a while since I had played with Full Site Editing, and in that time, Frost had become its own standalone theme and FSE had matured more as well.
I was curious.
My personal website had become so tired and dated and I really wanted to get #ericsbeertour back up and running!
What could I lose?
Ta-Da!
And here it is:
Straight out of the box. Nothing fancy.
I’ve got lots more to do and I’ve got a lot of ideas.
My sandbox has been made.
I’m ready to play.
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