New Year, New Job, New Website!

New Job!
- I have just graduated Georgia Tech with a degree in Mechanical Engineering and a concentration in Automotive Engineering. Now, I am cofounding a company, Ampere EV, with a couple others. Our company is creating integrated solutions for the DIY EV market, including safer modular battery assemblies and integrated control electronics. Super early in the project timeline right now, but it’s entirely possible some of our companies products ends up in an 818 while we’re developing it and I’d certainly share that on here if that becomes the case.
New Website! (Coming Soon)
- I have been working on completely rebuilding my website from the ground up. I assume if you’re subscribed to this list, you’ve seen my current site. It’s built entirely on Google Sites and has been super easy to setup and maintain. Great option for a low-maintenance site! But now, between work and driving the car, the build is slowing down (not stopping though) and the documentation of my car becomes more useful than the ability for people to follow along. Google sites has been great from a simplicity standpoint, but it’s really limited in the format I can present the information and integrations are pretty basic. Above all, it’s very poorly optimized for search engines (funny because Google…). My new website is being built with WordPress, and the customization options are endless! Honestly too much, and the nerd in me keeps messing with all the fancy plugins, but in the end this is going to make my site way better for organizing a large quantity of information and advertising that info to people on search engines. I’d gotten to the point where the things I was trying to add were outgrowing what Google Sites was really built to support so my workarounds got increasingly complex.
- Old setup: Google Sites + Blogger + Disqus + Feedburner
- New Setup: WordPress
  - Self hosted – I have my own Linux server I’m running the site off of so I still won’t be paying hosting fees. Meaning all I pay for this is $12/year for the domain.
  - Plus tons and tons of plugins
    - Elementor – drag and drop webpage builder for WordPress. I don’t care to code.
    - Mail chimp – new email subscription manager
    - Yoast SEO – search engine optimizer
    - AutoOptimizer – shrinks down content to make pages load faster
    - Smush – Shrinks images on upload to web-friendly size formats
    - Enviry Gallery – Let’s me build really nice photo galleries
  - Still fleshing it out and figuring out how I want to organize things. It’s easy to get stuck to the old format, but in many cases there is now much better ways for me to organize things. I’m sure the new site will continue to change a lot even after it goes