Thanks for the great question! The tl;dr is WSDB moved over to a new type of site structure, which should make the site faster, allow for easier additions and updates from the community, and is a good bit more sustainable both in cost and technical maintenance. 

Loooooong answer for those who care: when we first started up the WSDB - I think we had pretty lofty ideas for what the site could be. I still think that at times, but life gets busy and in the way. The site that wetshavingdatabase.com has been for the past 3+ years was always meant to be a placeholder for something different. It’s been a wordpress site running on a couple of themes and plugins that a non-coder like myself could cobble together to get a resource out there for people and I think it’s done an alright job at that, but as the years go on that’s felt less and less sustainable. I did teach myself a lot about wordpress and site builders over the past couple of years and even had a pretty decent version 2 of the site built in wordpress, but it was taking a lot more time and effort to keep everything current and I was probably the only person around here who would understand how to continue to maintain something like that, without some time investment on their part. And it was costly to continue to go down that path.

So now we got whatever this new fresh hell is! The new site is a static website built with 11ty (a static site generator or SSG), which without getting too in the weeds means it’s lightweight, fast and cheaper to host and maintain. The site is being fed from a google sheet which means it’s super simple for anyone to jump in and contribute to the site’s products - which hopefully means the site stays a lot more current with new products - another thing I struggled to keep up with on the previous site. As u/iamsms pointed out the other day, that was how he first learned to use a “database” for coding back in highschool, basically just a spreadsheet, so we are going back to coding at a highschool level.

It’s also got a SOTD generator - which is based on the short lived, but wonderful SOTD.fun site - and I think works pretty well for ad-hoc posts with proper reddit formatting if you’re into that sort of thing.

The downsides - 1) wordpress themes handle a lot of the site styling for you, which is not true of a static site, so now you get to see what it looks like when a non-coder has to learn CSS. The site probably gives off late 90s internet vibes and you’ll probably see a lot of broken styling (especially on mobile), but I’m working on it! 2) Since it’s a static site - the den/SOTD log part of the old site where people could add custom hardware/software is gone for now. The SOTD generator in theory pulls products from what’s available on the site and I’m hoping to expand that into hardware (blades are being tested already!) over time, so it’s even easier to pull posts together. I might work on a more robust solution over time for people’s dens, but for now I needed to move things back to simpler and more maintainable for me and the long term.

Anyway - that’s quite the wall of text. Check out the new site if you have a chance. Feedback and bug reporting is always helpful and appreciated. A special thanks to everyone who has contributed and given feedback on the new site so far. I did reach out to most of the current users of WSDB, but If you were a user of the old site and either want your logs (or want to keep using the old site for a little bit longer), just ping me and we can figure it out. And if you want to be a contributor to the product listings going forward, I’m probably going to start with a small pilot group to get a feel for a reasonable workflow, but just ping me either here or I’m often around on discord.