PHEW!

Ok, a few things added today. First of, pecelayam.com (version 4 by now I think lol) is up and running. Link clicky on the right sidebar! The reason I’m so glad is this is actually my first true website where I go down and dirty with the codes.

“What? Why? What do you mean?”

Well, with most websites, thanks to the Internet, many are what I like to call “Frankensite”. With so many different web editor these days, one can simply pull up a ready-to-go template and start plugging away the text. With little modification here and there, it is perfectly legitimate to say “hey, I build this website!”. I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with them, no no. The easier it is for people to access these technology, the better it is for the community to grow; so I’m all for it!

More advanced players would actually poke around with the codes. Most people do it for the visual aesthetic, some do it for security, the rest… just get a little curious. Oh, ok, and some do it for work But many of these people, for the sake of efficiency and self-education really, are the main reason I created the term Frankensite. Again, nothing wrong with them (maybe I should think of a different word). Heck, I’m one of them! We tend to use pre-made codes, modify it a little (usually a requirement for most free scripts anyway), install, and voila. In less than 5 minutes, with basic knowledge of editing text and uploading files to your webserver you can have a SQL-based-PHP-powered-CSS styled-RSS-linked script. Wow. All that for a pretty looking blog. Invest an hour or two just browsing, and you can literally teach yourself some PERL and Javascript codes to lock-down your website in ways you didn’t even think possible. And I haven’t even touched on Flash…

And you wonder why there’s such a huge boom on websites in the last decade?

Oh, yeah, back on the main topic (heheh), this time, Pecelayam v4.0 is actually a hybrid Frankensite; I can’t honestly really call it a PURE build-from-scratch site. To be technically correct: I’ve taken a couple templates and scripts into this and re-write everything from scratch. I cleaned up some “junk codes”, modify a couple modules, create a few PHP classes, built some scripts, and voila. That’s why I kind of…hesitate a little to call it Frankensite.

This is actually the first time I’ve ever put this much effort (and really, it’s not THAT much I guess heh) into making a personal website. I use Dreamweaver CS3 to build the main frame, and had a little jump back and forth to the net on adding little bits and pieces; like CAPTCHA (holy cow it ain’t easy to integrate that one to a completed PHP script, trust me. But it’s all worth it though, I can get up to 20 spam comments a day without this little feature), and the PHP main site. I also built the header and content background images with Photoshop, but that was the easier part though. I took the original photos myself and just mix up some hue saturation stuff.

Moving on to the actual blog, I’ve added a new Technology category and the link to go back to the main site. Maybe I’ll browse to some old posts and see if I can categorize some of them to keep things clean.

Going forward with the site, I actually have to finish some of the pages (yes, not all links working yet – I’m moving on July 1st to a new apartment, plus lots other things. So I’m a little tight on time.), and probably throw some Flash animations too. I was abit reluctant on the whole Flash thing  just because even though they look (very) nice, compatibility and security is still something I wouldn’t bother with. But hey, things do get improved, so maybe…

Bottomline, it’s a lotta fun to work, I (re-)learned a lot of things, brush up my programming, and definitely looking forward to a bigger better future! (Just like everything in life, really ^_^ )

I’ll even add some reviews and tutorial stuff on the Bits and Pieces part. Yay!