Welcome to the brand spankin’ new Undress Me Robot. Veteran visitors will notice the new layout, but even more important is that last line at the bottom of the page: powered by Wordpress. Front end aside, the site has gone through a big overhaul behind the scenes to fix all of the December and January wonkiness.

Indeed, wonky is the only word that really fits. Sometimes the site was up for everyone, other times it was down for some and up for others, and other times it was down for everyone (the saddest times of all). When it was up, a growing number of articles bogged down the backend, which wasn’t suitable for anything even as massive as Undress Me Robot. So even those lucky enough to connect to a working website had to deal with slow loading times. Hardly fun at all.

Truly behind the scenes, the content management system (the software used to organize and display all the articles) was showing its weaknesses. As a text-based CMS (compared to one driven by a database), it basically stores all the articles in one text file, and has to open that text file each time a page is loaded. When the file is small, the system is very fast, but the speed drops quickly as more articles are added and the text file balloons in size.

Moreover, the amount of metadata each article could have, ultimately meaning the ways data could be displayed, was severely limited out of the box. Customizing the CMS here and there worked for a little while, but there’s only so much time you can put into a piece of software before it becomes time to just trade the thing in.

Undress Me Robot is now run on Wordpress, finally entering the 21st century. This will allow for a website that is easier to use not only for readers, but writers as well, and happy writers make more and better articles.

As the finishing touches are put in place, UMR will slowly return to weekly updates. So remember: listen to the undress me robot, then undress me, robot!

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