stephenminded

When thinking about how I would bring my new site to life, I looked at a few open
source CMS systems like Wordpress and Textpattern. These projects are great and
give you everything you need to get a fully operating site up in minutes (in fact, I’ve used both of them before); but, that’s no fun, now is it? More importantly, I think it would be a missed learning
opportunity if I just blindly installed Wordpress and dropped on a template.
That’s not really the way I like to do things. Also, I had recently jumped into
CakePHP so I thought to myself “Hey, why not develop the thing in CakePHP?” Not a
bad idea eh? I thought so.

CakePHP

For those of you who don’t know what CakePHP is, here’s what the website has to say for itself:

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP which uses commonly known design patterns like ActiveRecord, Association Data Mapping, Front Controller and MVC.

Oooh, MVC! What does that mean? It stands for Model View Controller and it’s a common way
for software developers to keep the data model, business logic, and presentation separated.
Why would you want to keep these things separate? Well, it comes down to code maintainability, readability,
and the ability to add features to the application in the future (that’s a lot of ‘ability’). For instance, if I want to take this
post and make an RSS version of it, I really shouldn’t have to change any of the code to
get that data or change any of the data itself, I should just change the way I present it
to the people who read it. A properly setup MVC framework lets me do that by
just changing the view and leaving the model and controller untouched. If you want to know
more about this stuff from people who can explain it better than I, google it.

So yah, the site. Cake made it really easy to come up with a very basic back end which
let me add, edit, delete and display posts. This was one model, one controller and a few views.
After getting the basics done, I started to add on things like comments and article tags. In the end I came up with something quite useful for my purposes. I
won’t go into all the details here, but I plan to have some posts in the future about that.

Design

Here is the thing that took me the longest. I tend to be picky about how things look and
could endlessly tweak here and there. So, I usually come to the point where I have
to just throw it out there and leave the tweaking for a redesign. I’m pretty happy with what I
have here so far, but it will undoubtedly change in the future.

I have always liked light on dark sites, and I wanted to attempt it with this site. The
colour scheme was thus inspired by some light-on-dark sites that I have been impressed with,
namely: Total Spore and older versions of
Snook.ca (not to say the new design isn’t impressive, its just not light-on-dark for the most part). So, thanks to Kyle Neath and Jonathan Snook.

Since this is a light-on-dark design, I tried to keep the text large and readable. The line-height is also increased and I use an sans-serif font so as to make the text easier to follow.

There you have it, don’t be surprised when it changes in the future and please let me know what you think in the comments.

By the way, RSS is on its way

Well, this is my first post to this long in development/design site of mine! It feels pretty good to unleash it on the world, so I thought I would write a little bit about why it came to be.

Here’s the deal. I’m having a bit of a pre-life crisis right now. What, exactly, is a pre-life crisis you ask? Well, I think a lot of students go through it after they graduate and it has everything to do with not knowing what to do. Thats right, I really don’t know what to do with my life. Now, its not like I have absolutely no clue, because I know it has something to do with this little box I’m pouring these words into right now (psst, it’s a computer…), but I don’t know specifically what that something is. I like this whole web development kick I’ve seemed to be on for, well, a long time now; so, for now I’m going to go with that.

End Post.

Wait! You thought I said that I didn’t know what I wanted to do? Well, I lied. A bit. My specific case of pre-life crisis happens to be something similar to: “Should I go get a 9 to 5 job, or should I continue on this freelance path I’ve been on for a while now?” There, that’s my problem.

Those of you who know me are aware of the fact that since I graduated from Carleton in June I’ve been working on contracts for various clients doing web development (PHP, MySQL, JavaScript, XHTML, etc). This has been great so far, it’s paying the bills and I get to be my own boss, a dream of mine for a long time. (The dream is being my own boss, not paying bills — although I do have nightmares about that one from time to time.) So, I had to come up with something to do to keep doors open on both sides; something to help build my career — ugh, I sound like a guidance counselor now.

That’s where this site comes in. Along with allowing me to occasionally post personal stuff like what you are reading now, it provides a few more important functions:

• It helps build an online presence, since some people might actually find my articles here useful.
• It provides somewhere to show prospective employers my work.
• And, it serves as a reference for me.

Overall, I think the time invested to get this site up and running was definitely worth it. I hope to look back on this in a year and see it as one of the most important things I did in 2007. So, with that said I now go to sleep and ponder my situation some more.

Good Night.