I just can't decide—dark theme, light theme, fancy theme, or simple theme. With the direction I’m thinking of taking the site, a kind of personal journal, a dark, simple theme may be the way to go. I’m considering changing up the homepage to a simple, folder-like directory layout for the blogs and their various categories, reminiscent of the old site directories layouts from years ago. A similar site that came to mind is SteakandCheese, which was even closer to my vision but became a porn site years ago. In its heyday, it was simple, dark, and in-your-face with attitude. I loved it.
So I’m tossing ideas around for what I want Wisedocks to look like. I have the same unfiltered, unapologetic attitude as the guys at SteakandCheese did twenty years ago. That’s my era, and that’s still how I think. I’m not too worried about hurting anyone’s feelings, and I don’t get offended by much of anything myself. I’m not sure if my style even has a place in the world twenty years later, but I really don’t give a damn.
I’m not reaching for shock value, but I don’t mind calling a hen a hen. That said, I’m still open-minded—I don’t expect to change anyone’s mind, nor do I feel the need to. But I do want to express my opinions unapologetically.
Sorry, it’s easy for me to get off-topic. Back to the design. I think I need to eliminate the hero header and simplify my CSS. The CSS for the site has quickly gotten out of hand and could at least be cut in half.
Right now, I’m leaning toward a simple dark color scheme. The directory setup I’m envisioning is still coming together in my head. I think it would be cool to have that old-school retro blog look—no images, just a directory of blog categories with the latest post titles from each.
I just don’t know if that’ll be too simple, so I’m still debating it.
I do think I’ll keep the Wisedockle (working title) on the homepage. I’ve been playing it every day and enjoying it.
That’s my ultimate plan: for Wisedocks to be my personal website, featuring only things I enjoy. If you do too, great, but I’m not here to satisfy the masses just to get people to stick around. I just enjoy getting my daily thoughts out for my own sanity. And since I’ll visit this site more than anyone else in the world, shouldn’t it appeal to me first? I think so.
I use Ahrefs on all my sites, scanning weekly to check for traffic and a range of SEO factors, like title lengths and updates to make sure each site is search-ready. And that’s where a lot of my frustration comes in every week.
I'm constantly having to come back and change titles or descriptions because they’re two characters too long, or a description doesn’t have enough keywords, or whatever. That’s why I’ve decided not to worry about that on Wisedocks anymore. Those vague “rules” have made the internet so fake that people aren’t even visiting blogs like this anymore. Why would you, when you can get raw, unfiltered opinions on social media? Until they take it down for “violations,” of course.
There’s a reason I haven’t implemented comments on this site yet. Same reason I don’t like posting on social media. People love to tell you that you’re wrong. Doesn’t matter how right you are; people just love to argue and try to prove others wrong. Well, guess what? I’m not trying to educate anyone here, just giving my opinions—I don’t need your two cents.
And that’s why I like having my own website. If I were to ramble on like this every day on social media, I’d just end up pissed off at the constant replies from idiots with nothing better to do than criticize everyone else.
When I first started this website back up a few years ago, I immediately began writing about history, astronomy, video games, TV shows, rants, and whatever else caught my interest. Then I got the idea that I needed a more niche site—something that would drive more traffic and potentially let me monetize down the road. So, after about six months of posting, I deleted tons of blog posts and moved all the history and astronomy content to my Stellar History website. They’re doing great over there, by the way. I moved some of my personal rants to FartDump and made Wisedocks just a quotes website. For a year, I tried to get it rolling, posting daily quotes across social media and actively promoting the site.
I had very little to show for it. But Stellar History and FartDump started doing fairly well. After three years of studying the issue and trying everything I could find from my research online, I’ve concluded that this domain is just toxic to search engines. I don’t know how or why, but no matter what I do, search engines don’t understand what this site is about. The constant changes aren’t helping either.
So, instead of turning this blog into a chronicle of me complaining about search engine issues, I’m just going to have fun with it. If you’ve read some of my recent posts, you’ll see I keep saying the same thing—I’m going to just do what I want here, without worrying about SEO.
But the fact that I keep bringing it up probably means I’m having a hard time admitting defeat. I’m working on it, though, and I plan to start expanding back into topics like entertainment.
I really wish I hadn’t deleted my post about Satisfactory. The game finally hit version 1.0 a few months ago and has become widely popular. Just the other day, a friend at work mentioned he’d started playing a game he thought I’d like. When he said Satisfactory, I just smiled. I’ve been telling those guys for years to check it out. Considering we work in a warehouse surrounded by conveyor belts, I figured they’d appreciate the connection. Guess no one was listening back then.
On that note: I think I’m just hard to understand, because this happens all the time. I can warn someone, "Watch out, you’re about to get hit by that car!"—and after they get hit, they’ll say, "Why didn’t you warn me?" Okay, that’s an exaggeration, but it feels true. I’ve always felt ignored, like whatever I say goes in one ear and out the other.
So, yeah, I’m the “I told you so” guy. I’m actually fairly intelligent—not an Einstein, but I’ve always been curious and kept my head in books while everyone else was out having fun. And I prefer it that way. But it’s maddening when I’m ignored while trying to give someone straightforward, common-sense advice. I often find myself referencing Darwinism when people do something self-destructive or just plain dumb. But I digress.
Honestly, I don’t even know why I have categories on this site. I start off talking about one thing, and then it quickly devolves into a rant of some sort. Even if I’m not complaining, the topic will shift about forty times in a single post. I have the hardest time staying on topic. ADHD maybe? Never diagnosed, but possibly. That’s probably why I’m constantly changing the theme of this site. What I want shifts daily.
While at work, for example—I’ll spend hours thinking about exactly what I want to change on the website, only to get home, sit down, and decide I want something completely different.
Looking back at SteakandCheese in the early 2000s through the Wayback Machine, they just posted random rants on the homepage. I could totally ditch the whole “blog post” concept and turn Wisedocks into a long feed, like a social media stream, where I can write endlessly about whatever pops into my head. Then maybe the site wouldn’t be so confusing.
I mean, if you click the “Websites” tab and read the description, you’d think you’d find only factual, research-based posts about websites and design. But in reality, most of my posts start off like that, only to morph into rants that bounce all over the place. Just in this one post, I’ve gone from site layout to SEO to the game Satisfactory to complaining that no one listens to me.
I’ll figure out how to make this “weakness” a strength eventually.
