Wisedocks

Time for a Change?

Last year, I decided to move all my old ideas, features I'd built and then abandoned, to the Side Projects page. I shifted the focus of Wisedocks to highlight my blog almost exclusively, making it the centerpiece of the homepage. The idea was simple. Wisedocks is my personal site, where I ramble about life, hobbies, politics, and all the other nonsense I think about.

Now, with a year of data from this current setup, I’ve noticed something surprising. The AI image pages are getting the most traffic. I’m guessing most of it is coming from Pinterest, where I get around 50,000 views a month. That’s probably the most exposure I get from anything resembling social media. I don’t promote on Facebook or Instagram, or really spend time on social at all, aside from occasional Reddit scrolling. I probably should, but I’m more interested in building things than advertising them.

So now I’m thinking. Maybe it’s time to shake things up again. What if I moved the blog off-center and showcased some of the most popular AI images on the homepage? I could leave the Wordle-style game in place, maybe even add the clicker game, which has also been getting more attention lately. I don’t have a solid plan yet, but digging through my traffic logs made it clear. Some of these little side features I've made over the years are actually resonating with people.

Combine and Conquer

Part of me wishes I could just roll all my sites into Wisedocks. One domain, one focus. It’s not impossible. I could move everything here and just wait it out. But that’s the catch. Waiting. I usually give it a few weeks, see no major change, then get annoyed that "Wisedocks," a made-up name, doesn’t sit well with search engines. That’s why I split off StellarHistory.com. The name actually tells you what it’s about, and it performs better in search.

Whenever I’ve tried jamming history, astronomy, personal blog posts, games, and whatever else I’m experimenting with all under Wisedocks, it tends to confuse search engines. That said, search engines themselves are becoming less relevant. Everyone, including Google, is now leaning on AI to surface results. Oddly enough, my site rankings haven’t tanked. I haven’t seriously touched SEO in over a year, and yet the rankings have stayed the same or even improved a little.

I’ve tried merging everything and splitting everything, over and over. At this point, I’m not sure what the best move is. But I’ve also started to lose interest in grinding away at my websites like I used to. Maybe it’s time to simplify and just make Wisedocks the home for it all. Rants, history, randomness, everything. Just build it for me and let whoever finds it come along for the ride.

This is just me thinking out loud at the moment, but I am seriously thinking about just moving everything back to Wisedocks and focusing hard on this one site. I have spent much more time working on the features like user management, sessions, and a host of other backend code that makes this website much more robust. It has become too daunting moving updates throughout my little website ecosystem. It would still be a major undertaking, so I'm going to ponder on it for a week or two and see what I think then. That's my thought process this week. Stay tuned, because it will be different next week.