I’ve been feeling a bit dragged down by my website for a while now. I actually had three websites: art.nirak.net (formerly free-artwork.com) for my artwork, space.nirak.net (formerly os-agnostic.com) for my random home and non work related writings, and nirak.net for… mostly work related stuff. When I was in school, I used nirak.net to blather on about various school related thoughts. The accumulated 7 years of content had started to feel like an albatross I was carrying around. So, I decided to start fresh! This isn’t the first time I have nuked my whole site and started over. Nirak.net has existed, in some form or another, for 12 years, and I’ve completely destroyed it several times since then. (see some past versions–oh, the horror!)

This time, though, since I have a good amount of web traffic and didn’t want to break all my old links, I created an archive of past content in HTML form. If you really want to read my very dated post about library science students and programming, you can. I accomplished this via a nifty program called “site sucker” and a bunch of search and replacing. On the one hand, as a librarian, I abhor broken links on the internet. On the other, sometimes old content (specifically mine) deserves to die. In another few years I may decide to blow this old content away.

One of the biggest decisions I made was to start keeping everything in the same site. I’ve established three main categories, handily color coded, that I believe most of my content will fit into: Tech, for computer/dh stuff; Life, for photo essays about my dog and cats (only mildly kidding here); and Art, to post artwork. You’d think, since I have a master’s in library science, that this kind of categorizing would come easily to me, but it doesn’t. I am still uncomfortable categorizing design stuff as “tech,” for instance, but I will until it becomes clear it needs another category. For site design, I picked a theme (Visual) that would display all my content in a minimal way and altered it a bit, but the ultimate goal is to code my own theme from scratch.

One thing I handled less than perfectly were my feeds. I blew away my art.nirak.net and space.nirak.net before I could add a post directing people to the new site and new feed. Oops. I hope subscribers will find the “new” site. One purpose of the categories is having three feeds, so people can get my tech content without having to wade through pictures of my dog. You can find those feeds on the about page and in the sidebar.

So that’s it! Hopefully this simplification of my site will lead to more frequent posting of embarrassing things that I will want to destroy a few years down the road!