November 28, 2011
Structural Changes
Earlier this month I had stated that I don't know Coldfusion or ASP.Net. While I still stand by that, as for some reason I've been told that people lie like hell on their resumes, which doesn't not help everyone else who submit honest resumes.
If you have a copy of my resume, you should know that everything that is written down is the honest truth. I've listed my strengths in HTML (and currently using HTML5 on this site of which plan on using more Canvas elements in the near future), CSS, Javascript, PHP, and Linux. It's been a while since I've rolled my own MySQL database, and in preparation for that I am modifying the structure of this website to be more query based. Hopefully in the near future, I can get the backend of this site set up so that it is easy to use and secure. The frontend, as you can see is beautiful. At least to me it is. I was tempted to switch to a red color scheme, but then realized how eye-burning it is. It still won't hurt to try to make something that is less shocking. I'm still considering developing themes that are yellow, green, violet, and pink. I won't really use them here, but perhaps in some other application.
Yesterday, I had decided to set up the database a combination of Wordpress and Tumblr.
The strength that Wordpress has is its database structure, but everything else is a weakness. Wordpress's administrative interface and page structure is so scattered and over complicated. When I had used it back then, I felt that the page index numbers it was coming up with were random. Collectively, having a category system and a tag system felt like one way or another you weren't going to draw your audience to what you were looking for. Over all it felt like building a trainwreck on top of a junkyard. Spam prevention is possible through the administrative panel, but even if you add the anti-spam widgets and set thing up so that you permit what comments are posted, you're likely to get a deluge of spam comments anyway. (This problem might have something to do with the Apache settings, but touching them is more Senior Web Development territory.)
The strength that Tumblr has is its simplicity. They only use tags. Uploading images in blog posts isn't complicated. There is actually a sense of community and audience. Like Facebook, you can like a post, share posts, and follow blogs. However, the search on many of the blog templates is not designed to search within blogs but within Tumblr. Another flaw with Tumblr's search engine is that you can't search for two or more different keywords. All searches are done to look up exact phrases. For example, when you search on Tumblr for "Abraham Lincoln" your search will pull up all posts that are tagged with "Abraham Lincoln" or contain "Abraham Lincoln", but you will not get any "Abraham" or "Lincoln" searches not even if you use wildcards. Tumblr also does not allow you to reply to posts. Instead their solution is for the blog owner to modify the blog template to include a Disqus form on the post page. On the other hand, Tumblr uses Amazon Web Services to take care of much of their webhosting. So that is pretty cool.
Tumblr's Dashboard feature is an interesting feature. Here you can look up all the saved search tags and see the latests posts by the people you follow. However, it does become necessary to unfollow people after a while especially when their posts flood your dashboard. However, I won't be needed to develop my own dashboard queue.
The PHP on my website is marvelous, but I need to get over the hump of using my own MySQL database. I can do it, it's just that I'm new at it. But once I get over my hump, you will see some remarkable changes to this site.
