Welcome to AfterPad 2.0

If you’re a regular reader of AfterPad, you might have noticed some big changes. The MFi Game Database was redesigned to be faster, cleaner, and automatically updated. The controller catalog was rebuilt, updated, and replaced with a new interface. Disqus comments are gone. We even have a new forum.

There is one more change, perhaps biggest of all, and you probably didn’t even notice it: AfterPad.com is now built on WordPress.

Why transition away from Tumblr? A few reasons:

Speed

Tumblr isn’t slow. They have highly optimized code, great back-end servers, and a global distribution network. AfterPad pages on Tumblr loaded in under 3 seconds at their worst, almost always under 2 seconds.

I started with one requirement: I had to beat that number. I didn’t think WordPress could manage it. In my limited experience, I considered WordPress to be a bloated mess (I still do, but that’s a story for another day).

The good news: people have spent a lot of time and effort fixing WordPress’ shortcomings. Thanks to an aggressive cacheing plugin – and the fact that I had no intention of including any of the feature bloat most people litter their WordPress installs with – I was able to bring the speed of the WordPress site to consistently less than the Tumblr version.

But I took it a step further. Thanks to a killer service called Cloudflare, I was able to replicate Tumblr’s CDN advantage by distributing my site across Cloudflare’s massive world-wide server infrastructure.

The results: self-hosted AfterPad handily beats the Tumblr version. It often loads a second faster, maybe more. That’s reason enough to switch. And the next reasons are even more important.

Writing

The fact of the matter is, Tumblr just wasn’t designed for long-form writing. And it’s getting worse.

Without getting too much into the nitty gritty, Tumblr has a tendency to push out random updates to their web interface, and these updates have a tendency to break things. Big things – HTML that randomly stops working, copy-paste that’s still broken in Safari, coding that insist on wrapping figure elements with p tags.

I can’t trust Tumblr to accurately and consistently put my writing online. I have no recourse when things break. All of this was fine when I was just starting out; I know a lot more now, and I don’t need Tumblr holding my hand, and doing a bad job of it.

Security

I don’t track you at AfterPad. I don’t want to track you. The information you choose to share in the forum is the extent of the information I want to know about you.

Companies that track your browsing history, build profiles of the pages you visit and products you buy, sell that information to advertisers… I believe these companies are morally wrong. I want nothing to do with this sort of thing.

When Disqus transitioned into an unethical business model, I pulled Disqus. I built my own forum to replace it. When I couldn’t find a host to serve that forum, I bought my own server space and hosted it myself.

With Tumblr, I didn’t have that option. In addition to inserting unwanted and bloated Javascript libraries, Tumblr inserts tracking files. Various .JS files from Tumblr, Yahoo, and something called Scorecard research – ugh. There was no way for me to opt out of these. Tumblr made me serve them to you, and Tumblr made you download them. I don’t like that.

But here’s the best part: you don’t have to take my word for it. Thanks to self-hosting and Cloudflare, AfterPad is now SSL secured. The URL starts with HTTPS. The site even gets that little lock icon.

This is possible because I don’t track you. I don’t sell you to advertisers that insist on tracking your clicks and eyeballs. I can’t think of a single other gaming site that can claim this.

The Future

Tumblr is a great network for a lot of people. It enabled me to get AfterPad off the ground and in front of a almost a million people over the course of 1 year. I paid nothing for this service. But it’s time to move on. We’re in Year Two of AfterPad. I’m not slowing down, and I’m not going to be satisfied selling out my beliefs about what it means to be a good internet citizen, and what it means to build a good website and a good community. Switching to WordPress is the next step in this journey.

There’s nothing worse than when I read a website I love, but come away with the feeling that the people writing it don’t really give a damn about the me as a reader. We’ve all read sites like this. I never, ever want to be this type of writer. I couldn’t have made it this far without all of you who read this site. I don’t sell ads here – all money comes from commissions and affiliate links.

You used AfterPad to find apps and controllers, you shared those links with your friends, you publicized this site on the internet. When you did those things, you kept AfterPad alive and allowed me to make it what it is today. Thank you. 100 times, thank you.

So what’s next? I have some ideas. If Apple finally launches a game console, I have some pretty big ideas. But as always, I want to hear from you. What do you want to see? What don’t you want to see? I’m open to feedback, I’m open to help, I’m open to conversations about what comes next. If you have any ideas you’d like me to know about, head to the forums and let me know. If you’d rather share anonymously, send me an email.

We’re at a very interesting time in the history of iOS gaming. I can’t wait to see what the future holds, and I can’t wait to cover it all here on AfterPad.