I’ve been a bit off-the-grid lately, getting yet another gum graft (occupational hazard, unfortunately) and working on a crap-ton of behind-the-scenes shizz (much of which you will all hear about in the near future 🤞🤞).
One of those under-the-foil-closure initiatives has been a total redesign of the 1WineDude website, which in true Dude fashion began as a small project (implementing back-end website workarounds for maintenance stuff while my hosting provider worked on moving the website to a new server, which is still ongoing), and ended up as a much, much, MUCH larger one.
The website has not had a significant front-end redesign since the launch of Wine Taster’s Guide and Wine Taster’s Journal back in 2020. So things were overdue on that front. Having said that, the design changes were not radical by any means, but were meant to just make browsing 1WD easier, and drag it (kicking and screaming, in some cases) further into the 21st Century (I mean, damn, I was still rocking a right-hand sidebar in 2026?!?).
But along with the visual do-over, the site has been rebuilt almost from the ground up, with several of the back-end components replaced with more efficient/performant versions—much of it all sitting on top of a new technology stack. Then I got into optimization mode on the back-end, which was its own mix of both geeky heaven and frustrating technological hell.
This has all kind of been the bane of my free-time existence for the last couple of weeks, but is already paying off in terms of performance, readability, and just overall vibe for the site.
Now, I can finally get back to actually producing content (imagine that!), which I pinky swear is coming soon…
Cheers!
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