Thomas Kobelsky's BlogFilled with reviews, rants/raves, and puns. |
| My pride and glory. I don't even know where to start with this website. I suppose I'll start with where I started: late in 2008, I decided that I wanted to make my own blog. I didn't want to use one of the free services available like Wordpress or Blogger. I wanted it to be my own in every way possible, with the ability to edit any aspect I wanted to. Since I didn't know CSS all that well, I decided to grab a free template (found here) and modify it to fit my needs. |
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I have spent a lot of time working on improving this website. If I looked back at the original template and compared it to what the website is now, I'd almost disblieve that it was even the same at all in terms of functionality. I feel like the website has gone through 8 major revisions since it was launched: v1 | - when the site was in HTML. | v2 | - adding CollapsiblePanels in Categories. | v3 | - when I switched to PHP. | v4 | - making the Categories panel "slide" (position: fixed;) | v5 | - adding the Comments script (which I've since removed). | v6 | - adding the StumbleUpon + Digg buttons. | v7 | - replacing the StumbleUpon + Digg buttons with the LinkedIn button and adding the AddThis button to the end of each page. | v8 | - adding the Twitter Widget in the side panel. | v9 | - creating the "TopSection.php" and "BottomSection.php" files to more easily manage updating. | v10 | - adding the Tutorials section to the Categories panel. | v11 | - was going from http://student.vfs.com/~gd09thomask/Blog/index.php to thomaskobelsky.com/Blog/index.php | v12 | - adding the Tutorials section. | v13 | - moving a bunch of stuff around to incorporate my Portfolio. | As you can see, I have been doing some major tinkering under the surface. This website alone has taught me so much in terms of web maintenance and programming in general. You may say "Pff, it's just HTML with a little bit of PHP thrown in. How is that teaching him anything about programming?" I'll tell you: Before this, my knowledge of programming was very limited. I was using Dreamweaver because I was scared to mess with the code-side of things. Now that I've gotten my feet wet with PHP, I am pretty confident in my skills. I'm currently making a page that acts as a self-publisher for my blog. It may not seem like much in the wide world of blogging systems, but I'm able to affect every aspect of the self-publisher right down to the naming convention for each new file being produced. I'm doing this all through PHP so where it'll create a new file, edit certain files depending on category choices, and upload images all in one go, without the use of a database like MySQL. Aside from the HTML and PHP aspects, it has made me more detail aware, especially with "div" tags. If my website "breaks" when being uploaded, I can usually find the problem within a few minutes, and it's usually some tiny detail like forgetting to close a "div" tag, or forgetting to close a table's row or data cell. I can apply this to other programming languages as well with closing statements or incorrect inputs. | ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
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