Old OPOS Website version 2.0

I don't know how the readers of my website feel, but sometimes I feel like the car mechanic that works on everyone else's car except his own. I re-designed my personal website back in August of 2004 after deciding to finally jump on the blog bandwagon. I've had a personal website since 1994 and but it has always just been a website to post family photos and some basic information about yours truly. It wasn't until August of 2004 that I decided that I would like to have my own personal blog after reading and looking at other blogs from people in my profession.

Back in August when I created my first blog website, I kind of rushed through it, just trying to get it done because I wanted to get something up. Even in rushing through it the website still took quite a bit of time to develop because I designed the backend and the frontend entirely from scratch.

I decide to develop my own backend because I don't like using canned solutions for the backend and I enjoy backend programming. However, after this most recent re-design I'm considering migrating all my backend over to WordPress . Mainly because I think I could learn a lot from working with a good open source solution like WordPress and in turn I think it could help me improve my own backend end programming skills. Plus, who knows maybe I could get some warm fuzzies if I actually find a way to contribute to the project. But, for the time being my newest version is still using my own custom backend and I have no idea when I will find the time to convert everything over to WordPress.

In this most recent redesign I decided to spend a lot more time on the frontend since that's what people see and pay the most attention to and since I was down right embarrassed by the way the old version looked. I don't know that I will ever design something and then sit back and think, "I'm the man., Dang I'm good., or I bet no one could top that." But one thing is certain I like my new design a lot more than the old one. In the actual frontend design I've tried to pay more attention to the details like creating custom images for bullets and so on. I think that adds a lot to the design.

In this most recent redesign I wanted to add custom section titles using sIFR , however I was having some problems getting it to work the way I wanted it to so I decided to not use it in this first release of new redesign. I do plan to add some more details to the current site design when I can find some more time to work on my own stuff again. I guess for me it's back to working on websites for clients.

Some people might also be interested to know that I also did a lot of work on my photo album section of the website. I already had a photo album manager that I built a while back and was using on the old version of the site. However, I didn't spend much time on how the photos where displayed and was using tables to display thumbnails because when I originally wrote the photo album I hadn't spent much time working with CSS for layout. So on this new version I re-wrote the frontend to the photo section so that it uses CSS to display the photos. Also, I updated my pagination PHP class that I wrote so that the photo navigation links it creates gives each element a custom ID so that I can replace the navigation hyperlinks with graphical buttons. Thanks to Jeff Croft for helping me with the hyperlink graphic replacement.

That's pretty much the long and short of it. Feel free as always to leave your comments.