5 Years of Xadara: Part 3

[Yes, I know this post is long overdue. Sorry about that: as usual life has it’s way of taking up time. That, and Terraria]

So, by this time, it was coming up on 2010. Xadara was several years old, but had also grown stagnant. Very little conversation was happening on the forums, and while the “World Revolution” blog had its occasional updates, the site was basically rotting away.

It was time for a change. The site needed an overhaul, and actual content. A page where you selected either a blog or forums just wasn’t enticing. It needed an actual structure. Enter Joomla, and CMS Made Simple.

Joomla was the original CMS choice. However, it was, as a web developer friend put it, a “Clusterfuck” to work with. It simply did TOO much, and in the end, that overbearing flexibility made it not worth the time to work with.

Silverlight was tried, but it did not want to behave right due to ram limitations on the hosting account for Xadara. It was good software, when it worked, but since the control panel was virtually inaccessable, it simply was not usable.

So, a final option, CMS Made Simple, was tried: This one worked out well, with a theme that at least provided a proper design for what I wanted.

So, just before New Years Day, 2010, with the release of KMX4, Xadara was overhauled with a new design. The forums and blog stayed, but now the site had core content.

There were grand plans with this new layout… plans that never came to fruition. Reviews, in depth game data… so much was planned, but I simply never had time to work on such. Instead, after a few updates to the KMX4 release page, the site began to stagnate again. It would go on like this into 2011… and I would eventually decide on another change, one that I felt was inevitable.

The blog, World Revolution, was still being used. Posts were rare, but I did make them on occasion. I realized that, maybe, being a blogger would be the best thing, as by this time I had already tried to diversify the site beyond just KMX, or music games in general. I am a technology fan, after all, and I do have many varied interests. Why not make the site, at its core, about what I like? Why not talk about whatever I want to? It would have to work out, since it was purely me: nothing forced about it. If I wanted to do or say something, I could, and should!

So, in late 2011, I did it: I nuked the CMS Made Simple install, and the old forums, and migrated the majority of posts from the old blog into a fresh wordpress install.

What you see now is the result of that change. A new theme, some tweaks here and there, and boom: Xadara.com has turned from a simple music game discussion site, into something, well, so very typical, but so very unique.  No one on Earth is quite like me, and no site on Earth is quite like mine. Sure, it is just a blog, but it’s MY blog. My presence online.

As time goes on, I intend to expand the site in whatever way I feel is right.  New forums are in the works, as are a few other, currently secret projects. Nothing special, but well, they still are more content.

Xadara has been a labor of love, really. Through good, and bad, I have continued with the site, off and on, for over 5 years now. I have no plans of stopping it, and hope only for it to expand as years go by.