I've been on WordPress for over a decade. Somewhere in there it stopped being a blogging platform and turned into a full time hobby of fighting plugins.

Every time I wanted to do something simple, like add a gallery or embed a video, I'd end up three plugins deep watching them fight each other for control of the page. And actually writing a post? Moving an image around in that editor was like trying to move a picture in Microsoft Word. A complete mess. You'd nudge it an inch and somehow your whole paragraph ends up on a different page.

So I built my own CMS. Say hello to the Cyclone Management System. Yes, it's a pun. No, I'm not sorry.

I vibecoded this with Claude, same as the Ticket Foundry thing. And it only took an entire work day. Everything went far smoother than expected however. I was able to get all of my images, plugins, tags, etc from Wordpress migrated over to this complete custom system, and everything mostly works!

The biggest thing that makes me happy is removing about 10,000 extra images that Wordpress make in every resolution it could come up with, while retaining my original full scale images that it just refused to upload. The entire point when I created this site was to have somewhere to share my own photos and not have them get massively compressed by Facebook.

But seriously though, I do have around 960+ images hosted on this site. With Wordpress's own image handling, the Next Gen Gallery, and some other stuff I was using, there was literally over 10k images.

Maybe it becoming a huge mess was my own fault. Maybe it's Wordpress getting bloated. Who knows, but I have a new toy to play with. And some deadlinks I still need to fix!

  The difference. Is absolutely insane. 

So here's the thing. My "team" is me. Just me. And even a team of one apparently needs a way to track what the hell they've actually done all week, because "trust me boss, I fixed stuff" doesn't hold up great in a status meeting. I looked at the existing options. Every single one costs too much mone…

Over the past few days, I've been working on completely redoing my two silly websites, Flatiron Specials, and Endless Drunk Ron Swanson. The Flatiron Specials page went through a lot of changes, and has hundreds more ingredients added which means it can generate up to 2 billion combinations. Drunk Ron Swanson was just modernized so it works consistently across desktop and mobile browsers. 

Flatiron Specials

The addition of the Share button was a nice touch. It provides a link back to the website as well, so that others can play with it, and learn about The Flatiron. 

Far as Drunk Ron Swanson goes, well - the link is https://www.drunkronswanson.net. Someone swatted the .com address, so I'll never acquire the original. 

Oh yeah, this entire website has a new design too. I'm still playing with the CSS so there are probably things broken. 

I know that AI is definitely one of those things that people either embrace or absolutely loath. I've joined on team embrace, and use it for quite a lot of random projects. Anything from create stupid images, fixing the code on my websites, helping re-write an email to sound less passive aggressive,…

What a nightmare the past 2 months have been. We discovered an issue with our downstairs toilet, in the bathroom I renovated during the Covid lockdown, where the toilet was leaking water from the drain every time we flushed it. An issue that we knew about for awhile finally came back to haunt us. Th…

If you’ve noticed your web browser slowing down or acting weird in the background on Windows 11, you’re not imagining it. Microsoft’s Efficiency Mode (part of Power Throttling / EcoQoS) can kick in for apps like Chrome, Edge, or Firefox, throttling CPU usage and lowering priority to save power, espe…

I've been playing an unhealthy amount of the Xenoblade Chronicles X Definitive Edition release on the Switch lately. I really hated the Wii U release back in the day, but I don't even remember why I had problems with it. I just struggled to get into the game.  With this new release, I am absolutely hooked. I'm trying to max out everything and 100% the game as much as I can. A lot of upgrades require finding materials to craft stuff, however the game does have a material market built in which means you can just buy stuff instead. Kind of handy, except for the layout is absolutely garbage.  There are almost 500 items you can buy for crafting. This doesn't sound bad except for the menu only displays so many at one time, and there is zero options for sorting. Which gave me the idea, I was going to type out everything on that list and what page it appears on, into Excel, so I can just search for items I need. That lead me down another path, and I just created a website for anyone to use instead. 

I am pretty happy with how it turned out. For full disclosure, I did use a lot of ChatGPT to generate the page for me, based on the data I was feeding it. It took a ton of trial and error to get it to work properly, but the end result functions perfectly.  If for whatever reason you find yourself here and want to check it out, click this link!

Good morning everyone, how is everybody doing today? I can't hear you, I said. HOW IS EVERYBODY DOING TODAY?! 

Everyone in the room looks defeated. Slightly horrified to be forced into excitement that they were not expecting. 

Unfortunately I can't draw very well. But I can graft together BS to feed into ChatGPT and get results. Because I am a go-getter.