I first built this website two years ago now. I first built it because I utterly hated WordPress and what it did to my workflow for sharing all the decks I build. I wanted a way to spend less time formatting and working with the backend tasks so I could spend more of my time sharing the decks I loved playing. And for two years this stie did exactly that. I wrote in markdown copy and pasting deck lists right out of MTG Arena with no manual formatting or constantly breaking addons and images.
Over the years I have added a ton of functionality to the site from social media images, app icons, search, color and rarity highlighting, and a whole lot more. At each stage these additions to functionality benefitted every post I had done before, improving my already existing body of work. It was fantastic and I loved it.
But the reality was that I had learned quite a good amount about NodeJS in the past two years and the code I had written back when I started was really not in the best of shape. It was a big, single file monstrosity that was hard to follow and filled with repeated code and messy functions. It was hard to add features to, hard to read, and any time I took a break from working on it I always came back even more confused then when I left. But I never felt like I had the time to work on it. I had sat down a few times to try and improve it but I always ended up scrapping the work after weeks of errors and failures.
But that all came to a head about a month ago when I realized I really wanted to work on features again. So I finally ripped off the Band-Aid and did a (mostly) full code rewrite. There is a ton of the old codebase here, but there is also a massive amount of new work and much needed fixes and organization. I went over every line of the old code and updated, cleaned up, and started modernizing it. It's not done yet and there is still more work to be done to get it up to my new standards but (almost) every feature is working (If you can find the one I know is not, congrats you're just as anal as I am.) I am going to spend some time working on the code and improving it and then start back on new features.
I am also going to get back to building and playing decks again. I have missed it and truly believe it's time to return the same level of passion I once had. I hope you enjoy everything I have planned, and thanks for reading about this journey I have been on for the last few years.