Catching up and what I've been up to recently

What's up everybody? Welcome to another episode of the PW podcast. I am your host as always Peter Witham. You can find me and this podcast at peterwitham.com. It's It's been a little while since I've done an episode and there's a few reasons for that.

Number 1. I really wasn't sure where I wanted to take this podcast and I thought that a good way to find out would be take a little break and to just sort of think about it, think it through. Been thinking through all of my side projects lately, actually. I've still been doing the CompileSwift podcast along with the UI Buzz podcast, but a lot of my ad projects, I sort of sat back and and reflected upon them because, you know, as we all know, prices of everything continue to go up and that includes software tools and services. And this year, as each of those renewals have come around or in the cases of services when I'm using them, I'm asking myself, do I really need this and is there another way I can go?

Is it worth me using it because it saves me some time, some effort, whatever that may be or is there another way I can go that might be a little bit of a pain but save me a fortune? Now, you know, it doesn't sound like much, but I don't know what the total cost is. But, you know, you hear us say this all the time, right? As as developers and content creators and podcasters and everything else, it's free to deliver, but it's not free to produce. And there's a bunch of tools and a bunch of services that we use for different things and I'm really sort of asking myself, is this the one?

Should I go a different way? A perfect example of that is my wordpress hosting site that I sort of had a love hate relationship with WordPress and it went down again. Thankfully, my hosting company got it back up again very quickly indeed, so thank you to them. There's nothing I did. It's just one of those things with WordPress.

Anyone that's got a WordPress site knows how that goes. So I said to myself, okay, you know, last year, Peter, you started converting this to a static site, which for those of you who don't know, basically means it doesn't need code to necessarily run on the back end. And what I mean by that is WordPress, if you don't know, uses a programming language called PHP and it's not the best performing language in the world. Don't slam me folks. But that's what WordPress is written in.

Every time you load up a page, if it's not cached, it has to go to a bunch of database queries and a whole bunch of other things and render it out to the screen and all of that takes processing power and time. Now with a static site, it's basically delivering you old school HTML and CSS. Page is prebuilt is what I'm saying and so it is infinitely quicker. In my tests in the past, I've spoken about this. It is infinitely quicker, and this provides you better options for hosting because you don't need to have an up and running server and database and and a bunch of other things to to run the actual site.

You just need to have the files somewhere. And it also means massive performance improvements when it comes to SEO rating and, you know, viewers being able to see the page instead of waiting a couple of seconds. Doesn't sound like a lot, I know, but in this day and age, was we all know if you don't deliver instantly, they've moved on. Right? So instead of taking a couple of seconds, it might take a fraction of a second.

That all pays off. So anyway, the problem is that it's taking a long time to convert years years of blog posts. I think there's, like, 10 years of blog posts on the site. And as I'm going through those, you'll you know, I'll put a link in the show notes. In other episodes, I've spoken about, you know, bringing down the number of posts and removing some old irrelevant ones and all of those kind of things, but I've still got to convert the WordPress posts from a database into what I'm using for my static site, which is markdown files, which is just a fancy text file.

And then the static site generator takes those text files, uses the theme that I've I've built for it, and converts them to HTML files that are then published on on the website. So this all takes time. There is no fast route to converting content because invariably you've got a new format, a new layout, some extra bits you've added, some metadata or whatever it may be, new content, content you want to remove, all these things and it takes time. But I decided, you know, to hell with it. I said I'm I'm gonna convert this year's content, which I've already done and then I'm going to finish up building the site, publish it to replace the WordPress one and then bring online other previous years of content over time because the end of the year or late in the year, I should say, will be here before I know it and I'll be paying to renew WordPress hosting for another year plus the commercial plugins that I use on WordPress.

Don't get me wrong, those plugins are absolutely fantastic but I just won't need them if I'm not using WordPress. So all of that to say that I I sort of sat back for a few weeks and worked on all this stuff and sometimes it's best to just focus, get it done, or get it to a place where you you feel like you've reached the top of the curve and now you're getting to the easy slide and and that's where I'm at now. So I thought I'd just share that in this episode with you all, give you some things to think about because I gotta find ways to to cut down the cost. I'm not, you know, to be candid, I I don't make any money from my side projects except for maybe a very small amount for affiliate things, for various services that I use. But other than that, it all comes out of my pocket and, you know, life is hard for everybody at the moment.

Right? Doesn't matter what you're earning. It's it's narrow enough it seems and the costs are only going up. So I decided I got 2 options. I either kill off the side projects which I really don't wanna do or I find new ways to make them more manageable and cost less and and in this case, this is one of them.

So, you know, that's where I'm at with that. Same goes for all of my podcasting software and it's funny because I decided, okay, I'm gonna kill off my yearly subscription for my podcasting software that I use to create this very podcast and all the others. After trying alternatives, which I'd done before, after trying all the alternatives, they they just don't work as good and they don't work with my workflow and it would take me a massive amount of time to produce the episodes and I knew right there and then, if it takes me more time than it takes now, I'm not gonna do it. I just I don't have that kind of time and so funny enough, I was like, okay, you know what? This tells me this is the app I should be using and what am I using?

I'm using Hindenburg Pro. I'll put a link in the show notes for it. I don't get anything for promoting it, but I absolutely love it and I just cannot find anything that comes close from be it free or paid software and including online services. So, you know, that's the one that I use to edit and publish podcast episodes, and I gotta go with it. That is a necessary cost.

Without that, I I just can't do the shows. And so well, I could. I wouldn't like the end content that they produced and I wanna make sure I give you as good a quality as I can and and this app enables me to do that along with some plugins, but the plugins are one time payment. So that was great. Anyway, just want to put that out there to let you all know what's going on, But don't worry, not going anywhere.

That's not the plan. Still gonna be here and I just wanted to share this so that maybe all of you are thinking of similar things. You know, how do I find better ways to do things? How do I find cheaper ways to do things? Not because necessarily you want to, but because you have to.

So don't be afraid to do that. Right? You should always be looking for alternatives and it never hurts. Don't always be doing the same thing. That that's invariably not going to work out for you eventually because year on year things get better and there are better ways of doing things.

So that's it folks. Just a quick update there. I hope this episode has been helpful. If it has, please, please, please leave a review. Tell folks about it.

Word-of-mouth. Social media word-of-mouth. I don't know how you wanna put that. It really helps spread the word for my podcast and thank you to all of you you that listen and thank you to all of you that that tell folks about it. It it really makes it so that I can keep doing this podcast.

Without that, there wouldn't be circulation because number 1, I'm not that great at marketing and number 2, I don't have enough hours in the day to do it all. So, truly, thank you to you all. Hope you have a great week, and I'll speak to you in the next episode.