This site has been running on WordPress for a long time. It worked, but it also came with a lot of baggage — theme files I didn't write, plugins I didn't fully trust, and a dashboard that always felt like it belonged to someone else's project.

So I rebuilt it. Everything. From scratch.

The Stack

The new site is pure PHP 8.1 with a PDO/MySQL backend. No framework, no Tailwind, no JavaScript libraries. Just a front controller, a handful of views, and CSS I wrote myself. The font is JetBrains Mono throughout — the same monospaced font I use in my editor — because the whole aesthetic is meant to feel like a terminal session, not a marketing page.

The color palette is neon green (#39ff14) on near-black (#060608). Glows instead of shadows. Tight letter-spacing on headings. Everything clickable has a hover state, a focus state, and an active state.

What Changed

The sidebar is now actually useful. It has a collapsible archive tree that expands from year down to month, a live category list, and a tag cloud. Previously that information was buried or nonexistent.

The two main content sections — Dumb Laws and Useless Info — are no longer just category archive pages. They're dedicated sections with their own landing pages, custom hero descriptions, and sub-pages. So /dumb-laws/alabama is a real page with its own content, not a filtered list. Same structure for Useless Info.

The admin panel is also completely custom. It has a stats dashboard, post and page management, a comment moderation queue, media uploads, and full editors for every piece of content on the site including the section landing pages and sub-pages.

What Stayed

All the old WordPress content is still here. Posts, categories, tags, comments — migrated over. The URLs are the same where it matters. Nothing got lost, it just moved into a system I actually understand.

Why Bother

Mostly because I wanted to. WordPress is a fine tool but it wasn't the right tool for a site this small with opinions this specific. The new codebase is a few hundred lines of PHP and a single CSS file. I know exactly what every part of it does.

That's a good feeling.