It is time for me to begin resurrecting my personal blog. I’ve seen Alex redesign his site twice now. I’ve seen John grow his site beyond belief. I’ve even seen Amber and Nikki come and go from the blogging world 2 or 3 times. My reason for blogging though has never been ‘because everyone else is doing it’. In fact, I’ve had a personal site (albeit not a blog) longer than just about anyone I know personally.
The reason I blog needs to be because I have something to share with the world. I’ve always believed I’ve had ‘stuff’ to share, however, I didn’t believe it to be ‘worthwhile’. I now believe that I again have worthwhile topics to share with the world.
To help me keep on task, I’ve decided to create a set of goals that I would like this site to achieve. They are:
- Stay on Topic: This site will be more about computers, business, and growing up, more than it ever has before.
- Stay on Interesting Topics: It will be less about the daily ramblings of my mind.
- It will highlight things I find interesting across the web.
- It will provide a way for users to give feedback to me, as well as to each other.
With that in mind, I will be starting the design process entirely from scratch. I want to think, and write, about each component of this site as it comes to life. I want to share my reasoning behind it. To this end, I begin.
Let us begin with the opening wave of decisions. The underlying code is written in a combination of PHP, CSS, and Mysql. It’s no different than any of my previous sites, with 1 major exception. It’s now running on a content management system I use at JR Computer Associates called Sunfox (http://www.sunfox.net/). This content management system will provide a quick way for me to implement design changes, as well as import new modules. It will also save me tons of time when it comes to address rewriting.
The design is rather basic. There are only 2 images, the background and the header, in use at the moment. I’ve gone with a more or less “Grid” structure underlying the page. This structure will allow me to move things around kind of like a newspaper, allowing things ‘fit’ into certain areas of the site. I hope to provide more details on how this is accomplished at a later time, but for now, just know it is some rather basic math combined with a series of div classes.
None of the functional systems that are part of my goals are in place… Including the normal tools I have for myself that allow for easy updating. For the moment, I’ll be doing basically everything by hand until I know that I’m happy with the tools I have created (or will create). I hope that by doing it this way, I’ll be able to go into depth about how I implemented them and why. Until then though, you’ll just have to watch, wait, and see where this all goes.