A brief history of comet.cool...
Version 1.0 went live on Feb 15, 2016. It was a new type of blog, 100% hand-coded by myself (Ryan). The blog would automatically update with a new post once per day, and there was a post queue maintained on the back-end. Users could submit new posts by sending an email to a special inbox. Users could give their posts a priority, which would determine where it would initially fall in the queue. To this day, I still love the concept! Unfortunately, posting once per day is quite hard - and maintaining a hand-coded blog is also hard.
Version 2.0 went live on Sept 18, 2018. In this version, I ported the blog over to an established python platform known as Mezzanine, which uses the well-known Django framework. This gave the blog a lot of new features, but the daily post queue functionality was unfortunately lost. While Mezzanine eliminated a lot of the back-end coding for me, I still needed to design the front-end, deploy the site to a host, manage the DNS, and apply updates manually (which I rarely ever did).
Version 3.0 goes live today, Sept 26, 2023! The site is now maintained and hosted by Wix, which is a platform that handles just about everything. I migrated all of our older posts into this new platform using some incredibly dubious hacking (so let me know if any old posts don't look right). I am hopeful that Wix will serve as a stable foundation for the future growth of comet.cool.
Over the course of these three website versions, I've progressed from a 100% hand-coded to 0% hand-coded. I'm grateful for what I learned when working on Versions 1.0 and 2.0, but now I am excited to let the professionals handle the technical guts.
Below are a few specific details related to the migration from Version 2.0 to 3.0:
All user accounts are gone. Your login/password for Version 2.0 will no longer work here.
Comments on blog posts were not migrated from Version 2.0 to 3.0.
Blog categories, tags, and related posts were not migrated from Version 2.0 to 3.0.
Photo gallery pages were not migrated from Version 2.0 to 3.0. I know there are a few blog posts that linked to gallery pages - and those links are likely broken now.