Website

This website is home to my collection of photos, rants, raves, and the occasional semi-coherant ramble.

What is my site about?

My site started off a few years ago as a typical personal blog – rants about problems I’ve encountered and the things I’ve been up to. Over the last few years, I’ve added many other things to the site including photos, and details of some of the applications I’ve built.

I’m now aiming to write a lot more ‘articles’ instead of personal blogs over the next few months – although you can still expect the occasional rants. I’ll be looking at web design, internet applications and web 2.0. Since this is such a big industry, and the web is my job, I thought it’d be nice to look into this a bit more. You can see my first attempts here.

Why the redesign?

I typically look at redesigning the site every year (usually around exam time), but this time its much more than just a redesign. The site initially started off as basic HTML, but shortly moved to a database driven classic ASP site. The whole site was built from scratch using my own systems. As it has grown, and I’ve added new items (such as photos and projects), its become much more difficult to maintain.

When I decided to redesign, I considered building the new site from scratch using ASP.Net, but realised that there was no point reinventing the wheel and opted for this WordPress powered site instead. The ability to use a tried and tested content management system and pre-built plugins makes things 100 times easier than my previous site.

Why are some parts of the site different?

The site is still very much a work in progress. Converting my old site across to this new one is not an easy process, there are hundreds of blog entries, nearly 1300 photos and numerous other pages to bring into the new CMS. As the next few months go on, I’ll try to bring everything under the one design.

What are the project pages for?

Throughout my time at university, I’ve been involved in producing a lot of reports and various applications. The project pages are a place for me to store these. They will also (in the future) contain information about some web applications that I’ve been developing.

Where have some sections gone?

I’ve moved some things about in this latest redesign. Things like my Last.fm music profile have moved into the “Profile” section. Once I have a better idea of where everything will end up, I’ll put a list here.

Where did you get that word cloud used in your banner?

I got it from the fantastic Wordle. Put in a list of words or give it a website to use and it comes up with fantastic creations like my banner.

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