Design of the new site

The design of the website was a major decision to take, which would require a bit of effort (precisely a few week-nights and complete week-ends). But then I was getting sick of the previous site contents/theme. From a developer’s point of view, what I had earlier here was quite raw one (and so is now). And then suddenly out of frustration I took the chance, installed Fedora Linux Core 1 on top of Microsoft Virtual PC, which would henceforth be used as my development server. Working on a FC1 running within VPC, un-believingly, with only 64 MB of RAM was real fun.

Can you believe FC1 rocking with heavy weights like apache, mysql, samba (and a few times KDE too). That was a nice experience to have in the present world. It’s like going back in the time by 6-7 years, when 64 MB used to a great thing. I still remember Tausif’s computer rocking with RHL 6.2, which was my first installation. I guess I am getting off-topic here. Well once the decision was made, to renovate the website By this time I had already got hands on developing other websites, however PHP was something new to me as a language, but it hardly took me any time to be there. The platform for development was all set, all the servers and the environment, including a few PHP editors being installed on Windows (which eventually I never used). My good old “vim” does pretty good job at what it is supposed to do.

The next major challenge was to come up with a website pattern/theme which would have better manageability and maintainability. Apart from this, the structuring of the data/content was important factor to design the layout.

Some times, rather most of the times, human beings tend to realize the value of what they posses, only after loosing it, So I consider myself to be “Normal Human Being”.

Using table seems to be binding the structure too much into the data so thought of using CSS features to get the similar functionality, at-least to get the block layouts in the page. Learnt a lot while playing around with CSS positioning/element layout. Finally arrived at the format that is currently being used, Using the components on the page, to be precise, the “header”, “sidebar” and, the “footer”. CSS gave me independence to change the sidebar/header/footer position anytime without touching the data in the main files, also it gives freedom to implement theme based systems, where-in the themes are contained in the CSS files rather than being embedded in the data file.

And at last… arranged all the contents and the utilities in the right place in the right format. That’s in brief of what all I did for designing this new layout website.

Well the modification/enhancements are still underway, considering adding the XML data elements and using XSL wherever possible to do so, like most of the static pages etc.

Would consider writing a complete article someday when I’m in comfortable position.