Hello all.
First, I want to start this post saying “thank you all”. I started this website in 2011 when I started earning some little money when I started college, and it has been a fun trip since then. I blogged mostly about iOS and occasionally covered different topics throughout the years. Sadly, it’s time for this specific website to go away.
You may be wondering why I’m taking this measure now. First, you need to remember that I haven’t blogged anything since 2017. My website has almost become irrelevant in terms of content as I haven’t put enough effort in keeping it updated, mostly because I’ve been busy with other things.
When I started this website, I was very surprised by how many people started sharing its content. Not only did people share it with others, people started referencing the content of my blog as a reference for what they were writing. Throughout the years my posts have been linked in StackOverflow answers, and I have even seen it linked from university websites! Makes me think that some tutors thought my content was worth it to share with their students. Seeing my content being spread that way brought big smiles to my face, especially when I noticed sudden spikes in my website’s traffic. Even more surprising, some people actually grabbed my original content and translated it to their own native language to share knowledge even further. I want to thank the people who did that as it made me feel that my content was appreciated.
Unfortunately, right now the vast majority of my content is outdated, and it’s not very relevant anymore. Also I think my writing style has changed throughout the years – I’ve read my older content and I just can’t believe I used to write the way I used to do. Despite being a college student at the time, my style is immature at best, and childish at worst. This kind of thing leaves a wrong impression in my image, and I want it to go away to pursue other endeavors.
Got ya! This is not a goodbye!
I’m not actually thinking in killing my website entirely. Rather, I think it’s time for a new beginning. I want this old website to go away so I can start anew. I do not only want to start writing higher-quality content, but I also want to have a bigger level of compromise with the people who have been reading me in the past 8 years.
And this is I want to do: I want to start a new website, with this very same domain, but with a different format, and with higher quality content. The new website will still be a blog, but I will be using a static site generator instead of WordPress (which frankly I’ve wanted to get rid of for a long time now, but I’m just getting into it).
You might be wondering why such a dramatic post if this website is going to continue in some form anyway. There’s a few reasons for that. First, I wanted to give a big and legit thank you to all the people who have read my blog in the past years. I started blogging as a personal log of things I learned, but it eventually turned into this big thing that got shared around more than I had expected. The second reason is that I want to start with new fresh content, and that means that all my blog posts are going away. They are not being migrated to the new site. Save for a very few exceptions (it’s probably about 10% of my content), everything is going to be deleted, and I wanted to give my readers a change to archive any blog posts that they don’t think are gonna make the cut.
If you want to ask me what content is gonna be carried over to the new site, the answer is “I don’t know yet”. I have the WordPress data that shows me what posts are still very popular, but I do not want to carry all of those to the new site. Also popularity is not related to quality or even relevancy. For example, the article “Are You Storing Sensitive Data in NSUserDefaults? Stop Doing That!” is one of my most popular posts to date. This one has been shared and translated many times. The problem with it is that, while the core idea of the post is still very true today, many things have changed since I posted it – you cannot really access the plist
file as easily anymore, so I’d have explore things again and see to what level is still relevant, and whether it deserves such many words to express the main idea. Also, I absolutely HATE the writing style on that one. It makes me want to pull my hair off. It’s very popular, but I feel embarrassed it has been read so many times. Another article that is popular is Multithreading on iOS And Mac OS X Using NSOperations.. This a popular article (not as popular as the other one, though) and the content on it is still very relevant today. The problem with it is, again, my awful writing style. I might carry this one over but not as it currently is. Instead, I might rewrite it from scratch.
Some posts will disappear completely altogether, and the others will be rewritten from scratch. I’m still deciding which ones will make the cut.
As for when this website will go away for sure, I cannot really give a solid date yet. I’m currently working on the new website and exploring static generator tools (I think I’m gonna stick with Hugo). Once I choose the static gen tool, I will go through my old content and choose the ones that will be carried over to the new website. All this could be done for this Friday as it could be done next Friday, or in six weeks from now or more (or less). The new website will not be launched with empty content, and I will do my best to map their URLs to the new website so they don’t break across the vast ocean that is the internet. Also, as part of my compromise to you guys, I will start blogging more often. I will try to organize myself better to write more often. In the past months I have followed many other Swift Devs and I’ve been inspired to involve myself with the community more. I have a desire, and that desire is to be relevant in the Swift and iOS communities again, and I cannot do it with my old content.
So, if you care about still having access to the old content from this website, make sure you save what you care about it. If you are an archivist, please do me a favor and save my website in a way that can be accessed (I can’t be bothered to take such measures myself) by others in the future.
For updates on the upcoming website, follow me on Twitter (@AndyIbanezK), and once again, thank you all for your support.
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