Cyclone Management System

I've been on WordPress for over a decade. Somewhere in there it stopped being a blogging platform and turned into a full time hobby of fighting plugins.

Every time I wanted to do something simple, like add a gallery or embed a video, I'd end up three plugins deep watching them fight each other for control of the page. And actually writing a post? Moving an image around in that editor was like trying to move a picture in Microsoft Word. A complete mess. You'd nudge it an inch and somehow your whole paragraph ends up on a different page.

So I built my own CMS. Say hello to the Cyclone Management System. Yes, it's a pun. No, I'm not sorry.

I vibecoded this with Claude, same as the Ticket Foundry thing. And it only took an entire work day. Everything went far smoother than expected however. I was able to get all of my images, plugins, tags, etc from Wordpress migrated over to this complete custom system, and everything mostly works!

The biggest thing that makes me happy is removing about 10,000 extra images that Wordpress make in every resolution it could come up with, while retaining my original full scale images that it just refused to upload. The entire point when I created this site was to have somewhere to share my own photos and not have them get massively compressed by Facebook.

But seriously though, I do have around 960+ images hosted on this site. With Wordpress's own image handling, the Next Gen Gallery, and some other stuff I was using, there was literally over 10k images.

Maybe it becoming a huge mess was my own fault. Maybe it's Wordpress getting bloated. Who knows, but I have a new toy to play with. And some deadlinks I still need to fix!