Vu and Lara at W♥M (May 4, 2012)

I’ve been busy updating the We Heart Music About Page (which you can access on the very top menu, next to Contact, on the front page). It’s kind of fun to take a drive down memory lane. As you can see from the timeline, there’s been a lot of changes since 2007. I wish I had taken more screen shots at random times, rather than just waiting for an event to trigger a manual snapshot.

Speaking of change, I need to change with the times and let WordPress do more of the heavy lifting as far as formatting and layouts. As you can see, I still rely on putting together every page by hand.

HISTORY

January 2007: Vox.com was a free blogging service, opened to the public in October 2006. I started playing around with it with a music website (successlessness.vox.com). The first entry for Harry Chapin on Thursday, 25 January 2007 at 07:55 PM
February 2007: Quite a few friends and music lovers came aboard to help write, including early contributors by Cristina, Ryan, Gus, Randy, Celeste, Jamie, Adina, Minh, Melinda, Mads, Brody, Kristine, and Troy. There was also an anonymous contributor.
March 2007: We originally wanted to call it We Love Music, but due to copyright, trademarks, and domain registry, we came up with We Heart Music (aka We<3Music, We♥Music, W♥M). The name was suggested by Ryan. It was the best thing for branding.
September 2010: Vox eventually folded and we were migrated to Typepad.com, where we remained grandfathered in with Vox’s original promise.
January 2020: John moves to Kansas City
October 2020: Typepad stopped accepting new customers. We were worried, but thought it was only temporary, due to the pandemic.
November 2024: Vu moves to Jacksonville, Dave and Thaddeus are now in charge of Minneapolis
March 2025: Explored options to migrate the website to WordPress, only as a backup plan.
August 27, 2025: Typepad announced it would shut down on September 30, 2025
August 28, 2025: Executed backup plan, setup wheartm.com.
September 1, 2025: Ultrawide support for wheartm.com!
September 30, 2025: End of life for TypePad

Vox: Mar 2007

Vox: Jun 2007

Vox: Jul 2008

Vox: May 2010

TypePad: Sep 2010

TypePad: Feb 2012

TypePad: Feb 2013

TypePad: Feb 2014

TypePad: May 2020

TypePad: Sep 2025

WordPress: Sep 2025

W♥M

Vu’s WordPress Diary
08/28/2025: I have decided WordPress is our future home. Granted, it wasn’t my number one choice. I have also previously expressed that I don’t understand the way WP works and that it doesn’t allow pre-formatting and custom layouts. Let me tell you, it was a real struggle to get things up and running, and even now I’m not quite happy with the way it looks.

08/29/2025: Now that we’re settling in on WordPress, their compose editor, called Gutenberg, was a total shocker to me. It was so new and different than what I understand of a compose window that I gave up on it immediately, and deactivated it in favor of the Classic Editor. Although Gutenberg is definitely not something for me, I do recognize that many people love this new “block” approach to writing and composing. The theme we’re using is called CoverNews, by AF Themes. It looks like what you would expect with an online modern blog or magazine-style. Personally, I think it looks too busy, but this is what modern looks like.

09/01/2025: It’s day four working and understanding WordPress. I think I am getting the hang of it, but I’ve got a long road to go, because 99% of our formatted TypePad posts need to be reformatted to better display and read on WP. I’ve previously mentioned that WP has rules and behaves differently than TypePad or Movable Type (incidentally, I just looked up Movable Type – they have over 80% market share in Japan!). Right now I’m pretty happy with the ultrawide support for the website. It will also scale based on your screen (so you can view it on your phone).