Birth of a website
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 :)
Have the honour of commenting first!