A couple of years ago I threw together a little feed aggregator to collect Kansas Jayhawk-related sports headlines into one place. I used a domain name I’d owned for years, a free WordPress theme, and a couple of WP plugins to slap everything together in less than an hour.

Fast-forward to the very last day of 2014. I’m in the middle of migrating hosting providers, and as part of that I don’t want to maintain any more PHP-based sites. In order to keep the site going, I’d have to either find an alternate hosting solution or rewrite it. I chose the latter.

I’d been thinking about a rewrite anyway, if for no other reason than to have more control over the app than I’d get by hacking around on WordPress. In particular, I always wanted the headlines to be more of a daily listing, and not look like a blog. Also, WordPress.

I started messing around with it a couple of weeks ago, and officially switched DNS over a little while ago. Rock Chalk Nation, the reboot, is live!

It’s got a few issues that I already know about, so don’t feel like you need to report them:

• I haven’t imported old headlines from the WP version yet. This is a separate task that’ll hopefully yield content for a future blog post or pamphlet or something.
• It’s not very mobile-friendly yet, and I’m sorry if that gets you uptight. I’m using Bourbon for the first time on this project, and haven’t done the work to get responsiveness and all that going.
• For that matter, I have no clue how it looks in IE. I’ll try to check someday.

A few things I learned along the way:

• The ads on the old site were ugly and annoying, and to this day I’ve yet to see a penny from Google ads. So I nixed them.
• RSS may not quite be dead, but from what I’ve seen during this reboot, it’s on its way. I ran into a few feeds that were still advertised, but not actually serving anything. In other cases, a feed’s address just changed without warning. (I hope I didn’t do the same, but I don’t think I did.)

I’m not sure who still looks at the site besides me, as I’m too lazy to dig through the visitor data, but maybe you’ll find this useful.