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.

Finally something started working on the homepage

It's christmas, and lots of lightings everywhere. This year it is no more "White Chrismas" in NJ. Although people in Texas are enjoying the christmas snow, we in NJ, are still waiting for the snow :).

All that said, finally got something working on the my website, right now its already too late for me to formulate a writing on what all were the design/change control challenges involved in getting the full site up and running with the modification and, where do I still feel, I have not pre-emptively thought about the changes, which have already started troubling me. I am a bit skeptica about making changes now, but yes I would take that step soon with a pinch of salt to feel that pain too, so that next time I do not make any such mistake.

That is not a nice way to learn I guess :). Anyway, Wish you all merry christmas and happy long weekend.

Busy with changes to the system

I don't know how could I miss the "Injection Bug" while coding for the guest book module, someone made me realize it the harder way. Later on I have been working on a few modification/fixes, main among them being,

• Wrote cron scripts for rebuilding the index file from the my weblog at blogspot, library modules for the same can be found at /lib/net/atom


• Fixed the "Poisonous Injection"

Have been busy reading a few books late night, travelling, whenever I get time to do so (Probably thatz one of the reasons why I don't appear here very frequently).

Well, It's weekend time to finish-off the left overs'

True, gotta finish this junk work of re-design this weekend with something on site in working condition :). Right now, writing a cron-script for fetching the feeds from blogspot and rebuiding the index on my homepage every night. Hope it runs and works for longer time... Would write on the re-design tommorrow as I celebrate Sunday (must be kidding :) ).

What, again into sleep mode?

As usual went into short term hibernation getting busy with my work at office.... While the PHP on MySQL was troubling me (due to my own mis-doings), thought of taking a break.

Thought of installing Gentoo 2004.3, let see how it goes.. 2004.2 was quite painful process :) (atleast for a non-techie). Hope they improve on their installation system, of-course without loosing the performance edge over other distributions. Read that they are coming out with Live CD and GUI based installer in 2005.