I have a saying: “there’s lots of people I don’t want to be.” That’s particularly true when I look around at some of my fellow retirees, who seem to have “stopped.” Stopped caring – yes, but also stopped growing and stopped changing. Change is life and life is change. You know what doesn’t change? Something that is dead! So I embrace change, and its inherent challenge – the discovery of new things. The moment you put a lid on it and say “I’m done learning,” your life is over… you are dead.
Well I’m not dead yet!
Finally I can tell you what I’ve been up to. With the new year just around the corner, and taxpoodle.net coming up on the two-year anniversary of its launch, I decided to undertake a massive, ground up redesign of the site – not just the aesthetics or what you see, but the stuff “under the hood” that makes it all work. Talk about change!
Before retirement, and before I took on the facility management portfolio at Technicolor, I was – for thirteen years – a computer programmer, a damn good one if I do say so myself! So taking on this project was a bit like returning to what I knew and did best. With a twist. This week marks nineteen years since the brain surgery which forced my retirement and signaled the beginning of what I call my second act. And I’d be a fool (not to mention a liar) if I tried to tell you the coding I did over two decades ago has not been eclipsed by new and better ways of doing things. So much of my time lately has been spent learning those new and better ways!
My goal with the redesign and relaunch was not just to spruce-up how the site looks (though I did and we’ll get to that in a minute), but to perform a significant upgrade to how the site works. To make it better. So the first step was to migrate the old site to a new hosting service using the latest in web server technology. The old site ran on the Apache engine. The new site runs on the LiteSpeed engine and uses a native server-side cache that stores data so that future requests for that data (such as the CPU’s rendering of a web “page”) can be served faster without running up against load bottleknecks on the server itself. The TaxPoodle site now physically resides at a server farm in Arizona. Because the files were physically migrated, I also had to go through the process of updating and then propagating (globally) the DNS (domain name system) record for taxpoodle.net (and taxpoodle.com and taxpoodle.org which I own as well, both of which I point at the taxpoodle.net address so even if a user enters the wrong TLD – top level domain – they still end up at my site). This tedious undertaking took about five days with lots of concentration and attention to detail.
Design-wise, I wanted to strip away all the bloat, making the site lean and less visually “busy.” The TaxPoodle is, essentially, an electronic book. It’s a place for me to write and publish without killing trees. So the first thing I did was reassess the page layouts, focusing on their readability, and try out different color palettes and typography – I had some help from Ollie on WordPress (a design library and toolkit) which formed the foundation of the new site. To keep things clean, I did away with noisy sidebars cluttered with archive lists. Don’t worry – you can still see posts grouped by subject matter – click the category name above the title at the top of a post (e.g., “General” in the screenshot below) to see posts published in that category…
or a tag at the bottom of a post (e.g., “Dogs” in the screenshot below) to see posts tagged with that tag…
As I’ve gotten older, my eyesight has gotten worse. So things like color, font, and font size are really important to a text heavy site (and old, weary eyes) like mine. I tried several different color palettes, and ultimately decided on one that feels calm and comfortable while capturing the colors of the desert where Gordon and I live. Losing the sidebar gave me more real estate to play with on the page. Maybe it’s just me, but the whole site feels a lot more “roomy.” I want it to be readable, and enjoyable.
And of course these days many users read The TaxPoodle on their phones, so the design had to be responsive to that and automatically reformat itself for viewing on a smaller screen. Truth be told, that’s where I spent the lion’s share of my time as something that looks awesome when you lay it out on a full-size screen can really look awful when you view it on your iPhone. The site will detect your device and its capabilities when you arrive, then format accordingly, while not loosing the overall “look and feel” of The TaxPoodle. If I had hair, this is where I’d be pulling it out!
After two weeks (update 01/28/2026: now combined with work over the last month, as I’ve gone back since I originally posted this post to both fix and enhance several things) of tinkering, hits, and misses, I can now say I’m pleased with the results, and not just aesthetically… take a look at these benchmark grades the site is getting from Google.
First – on mobile devices (which includes tablets):
Second – on traditional desktop computers (includes laptops):
Some of that is the new design. Some of it is hosting infrastructure and server configuration. The old site was pretty good, but I never saw perfect desktop scores across the board – that’s 100 out of 100 on performance, accessibility, best practices, and SEO (search engine optimization) – or mobile ones consistently over 85. To be honest, there was a lot of new technology I first had to learn, but that is the adventure! And it beats sitting around on my ass all day, or worse – going to BINGO!
My mother used to call something she was working on that was challenging and involved, but which she enjoyed, a “labor of love,” and this was that for me. Probably because I coded professionally for most of my career, this was like a homecoming. It was immensely satisfying even during the most trying moments of the site not cooperating with me and refusing to do what I told it to.
What it wasn’t was work, because as I firmly believe – it’s only work if you’d rather be doing something else.