The New New Website

[Editor's Note, 6/12/24] This article is not about this current website. This current site you are on is my new new new website, this article is about my old new new website which I replaced in a matter of months. So y'know, heads up and all.

Hello everyone, welcome to the new new website. You may be getting a strange sense of deja vu or wondering how something can be “new new.” That’s because we’ve been here already! Less than a couple of months ago I launched a fancy new website built on another platform called Framer – the Dave website V4. It was, or so I thought at the time, absolutely perfect. It was built on a tool I quite enjoyed, I had spent months porting over all my work from Behance/Tumblr (a story for another day), and it was wrapped in some freshly baked branding that I felt finally represented me a creative. There was a little voice in the back of my head trying to tell me something, but the slick aesthetic and sheer fact that it existed happily let me repress that voice and enjoy my fancy new website. 

Since then, some shit went down. I spent a fairly large chunk of the following year listening to free and open web propaganda from the folks over at The Verge. I heard a lot of compelling arguments about how important it is to have a home on the internet that’s yours, free from large platforms like Meta and the various algorithms. Then with almost perfect timing, my not-Twitter feed was filled with smoke and debris caused by the dumpster fire that was the Unity debacle. To keep things short, the company that owned a popular game-making tool, Unity, decided to create new fees and then tried to retroactively add said fees to games that have already been released. Countless developers realized that legally, there was nothing they could do as this switcheroo was fully supported by Unity’s terms of service.

It’s also important to note that this website is more than just a place to display my work to me. This website is a project that has been ongoing in the background since I was in high school. I’ve been cobbling together and hacking countless pieces of software, web hosts, and social media platforms in a quest to find a cheap place on the internet that felt mine. One of those misadventures was heavily modifying a Tumblr theme that very explicitly told me not to in the code I was tinkering with. Sorry Cory (the theme developer), my bad on that one. With that in mind, imagine my horror when I realized my brand new website was not very far off from that exact Unity scenario. What if Framer decides to change their tools in a way I hate? What if they change their pricing? What if they change their plan structure…man now that I think about it, I’m already hitting limitations with the “basic” plan. Even if I export the site, it’s not like I could update it without their tools. Oh god, are they going to go under soon? It’s not funded by VC money, is it?!

So there I was, getting drinks at a nice restaurant in Allston thinking about this damn website rather than enjoying my evening. That whirlwind of neurosis and paranoia led to this, the Dave website V5 (Venti) (Thanks Crow for the name). Big difference between V4 and V5 (Venti) is that, for the first time in around 15 years, I’m finally building on a stable platform. I’m using the open source WordPress as the foundation which is being hosted by a separate web provider with a domain I own. All plugins and themes are regularly updated and are free/open source. No sketchy shit, no big tech discourse – just a stable foundation for me to start building something on. On the back end, the switch to WordPress means V5 (Venti) is easy to support, update with new work/posts, and even move to a new platform if something new strikes my fancy. Another huge bonus is that it costs me 85% less per month, while having more features than V4 (and with even more being added via free updates). 

So bookmark this website my friends, I have big plans for this blog and the project as a whole. Thank you for making it this far if you actually have, let me know what you think over on my Threads account. Stay safe y’all.