News Update: September 2025

A small update as we head into autumn. After a small snafu with getting all my URLs mapped by Google Analytics, I put a small project in the motion; converting Ikhangames.com URLs. Changing over the whole site from clunky GET-based to use pretty URLs (i.e slugs). At this juncture, the migration is pretty much complete. There's still some aspects that are going to be carried over until next year, but I just wanted to go over what these changes mean for users.

Since I built my without a site builder like Wordpress or Wix from scratch, I still had a lot of physical control over all the logic, right down to the .htaccess, which controls URLs. There were a few challenge in changes the underlying way the sites URL's. Since I wanted all my current URLs to be completely backwards compatible, I needed to be able to convert the current setup into the new setup seamlessly.

I needed to integrate my action based system to also accommodate slugs across all the classes as well as have all my page-to-page links and internal links conform to the now absolute paths.

This proved to be a rather time consuming snafu, as all my article images used relative paths by default, but every one of them has been updated now; fingers crossed.

I also had the small issue of needing to create over a hundred "new slugs". Thankfully, I was able to programmatically manage most of this and just perform a few small changes for article titles that had special characters or unusual formats in them. With that, virtually the entire site has been changed over, including the sitemap and parts of the admin section. The editor pages will still need some alterations; some idiot proofing with regards to the new slug input fields. All in all, I'm quite happy with the work done so far.

The WYSIWYG has a few new updates. As I write more articles and more types of articles more and more useful shortcuts and block tools present themselves and I just splice them in.

While my in-page editor is still not a true WYSIWYG as it is still ostensible an HTML editor without the real-time preview; the all important
What You See. That will likely be the next major-ish change to the site between now and 2026.

Google Analytics has been apprised of the new site map and hopefully will be fully crawled within a few more days. On a minor note, I've also updated the set of random images that relate to articles that have no featured image. So hopefully they'll be more stable going forward.