It has been a while since I posted on this website, I’ve had some things going on since the start of the new year that made me not have the time to really work on this website or my projects consistently. I have been working on getting things organized in that regard and wanted to share some of the upcoming changes I am planning on making to my content and website.

First, I am going to start updating and posting on my website more often. I was always getting stuck in the loop of wanting certain things made for the website, but since they were either taking too long to implement or weren’t possible at the time I would go looking at different software to achieve that while bringing the main website along. I have decided that the main website here will be WordPress, and anything I can not do easily, or has to be on different software will just be done that way instead of trying to integrate everything into one large pain in the foot app to maintain and develop. This might cause some issues down the line with syncing between things, but I have some ideas with how to deal with that.

Second, I am going to be using our community discord as the main “forum” and discussion application/software. One of the things I was trying to implement properly was having a place for community discussions to happen, while also having somewhere to talk about my projects and content. I’ve decided that the community side of this will be on our discord, while the forums on the website here (using bbPress, unless we need to upgrade to a more dedicated software) will be for the more technical and content/project specific things.

Third, I am going to be setting up the main website, and any and all applications needed for other areas of the community to be using OAuth using Patreon, Discord, and YouTube as the three primary login and registration methods. This will make it easier to handle account linking between the things I run, and will help me sync data between things as I won’t need to try and match user ids or other things and can just reference a person’s discord, YouTube, or Patreon id on each platform/application.

Fourth, I am going to be primarily focused on cleaning up the theme and content for the main website outside of doing coding projects. I made this theme and layout as a quick stop gap to have something usable while I sorted out the finer details of things. I’m not how I am setting up a staging/testing environment for this yet, but if the theme changes, or content is moved around please be aware that is the reason for that. Some URLs may not function correctly, I plan to install or code a plugin to put temporary permanent redirects on old content URLs to avoid breaking bookmarks or hyperlinks. Some content will also be removed, I have some things on here that are no longer relevant or were just not worth posting, that content I deem not useful to the renovated website will be deleted.

Fifth, I am planning on cleaning up and organizing the YouTube channel a bit, and integrating it with the website as more of an archive for easy access to find my content. This won’t be a full on integrated system like I was planning where you could view embedded videos and streams, but more of an archive/listing talking about my YouTube content projects and providing quick access to playlists and videos. I will still embed videos on relevant posts, but I am scaling back the whole “fully integrated archive” side of the website to be manageable without needing to code a whole software or plugin integration method.

Finally, I will be setting up some pages for a roadmap, milestones, and schedules for my projects and content. Some of these may link to off-site things like my GitHub for my coding projects, as I have roadmaps and issue/milestone tracking setup there already, but I wanted to make a summary page(s) on here like with the above plans for my YouTube content for quick reference/links to them. I will not be taking requests for content or projects at this time as I want to get through the backlog I already have, but that is a future goal.

Thank you for taking the time to read this long post. As I mentioned at the top I have been dealing with some issues this year and as things are getting better I wanted to post an update on what’s been going on. I may or may not talk/post about those specific things later, but at the moment I have the time and mental energy to get back in to doing things. I hope everyone enjoys the new updates as I try to revitalize and grow the community.

Thanks for reading,
-XerShade