Suburban Dad Mode always classic

Website Migrations

Late last night into early morning, and again through a big chunk of the afternoon, I migrated the three website projects I’ve been developing. All onto Cloudflare, all out of Sanity into no CMS, just .md files. Really simplified the code, vanilla CSS, got rid of lots of pages and features. Part to learn, part to make maintenance way, way simpler going forward.

I migrated:

  • Suburban Dad Mode (this site)
  • Methodology
  • Marcus Berley Psychotherapy

Dad Mode and Psychotherapy were all node-js projects with Sanity CMS hosted on Vercel. They were working just find. Very rich features, fast speed. But definitely a lot of complicated things I had added to the sites. So I scaled it way back, back to basics, back to essentials, back to what actually matters, not just lathering on layers of style, though that was fun too.

The software engineers that I follow online, at least a bunch of them, highly value things that don’t break and are easy to maintain. They’ve learned from experience. There are super cool web designers that have some dope aesthetics, and I dig that, but while I’ve been pouring time into these projects lately, it’s time to clean things up and get ready for spring, with the resumption of taking on house projects more fully, an accounting phase with taxes and the new business. I want to get back to focusing on writing, now that I’ve spent so much energy on design. I’d rather have a simple, robust system than an overly complex, gorgeous one.

Methodology was on a whole other tech stack, using Pollen for web-based books. But there’s a higher value for me in all three projects using the same stack, so the muscle memory drops in for me and it’s super easy and fast to make changes and produce more material. I thought about abandoning Methodology and Suburban Dad Mode entirely, but in the end I came back to rope them back in. Again, part of it is just learning how to migrate with Claude Code support doing most of the work (though there was still plenty to do).

So this is my first journal entry after the move, mostly to test to see if it worked.