I Guess This is Where Things Get Harder

A couple of reasons why it's bee almost a week since I last made changes to this website.

• Between work and home, I didn't have that much free time
• I've actually knocked off all the low hanging fruits

I won't bore people with my personal life, so here's what I mean by low hanging fruits.

• The layout of the website was pretty easy to create. I used Twitter Bootstrap for the layout of all the pages, which allowed for up to 12 columns on a page. It also supports responsive design, which doesn't work great right now because of the image size of the banner and I probably specified some widths and heights when I shouldn't have to make things line up right. At least I was able to create the basic templates in a couple of hours. This is where I have great respect for web designers who know what they're doing. They can fix all these problems in a few hours, where it'll probably take me a pretty long time.
• Configuring Amazon S3, Amazone Route 53, and GoDaddy so that the domain is hosted by GoDaddy, routed through Amazon Route 53, and the files are hosted on Amazon S3 was so much easier than I ever expected. I just followed the instructions on the Amazon AWS website step by step. I was also able to do all that in a couple of hours.
• The home page, privacy policy, terms of use/service, and the first 2 blogs were easy to write. The ideas for these pages have been in my head for a couple of years.

So now comes the hard part...

• I am no graphic artist and I don't really have extra cash to pay one, but I would still like to create a nice looking banner and menu. The current banner took me about 15 minutes to make in Microsoft Paint, and I know it shows. I'm going to have to figure something out.
• I need to decide on a commenting system. I don't know if anyone will actually come to this site and leave comments, but I sure hope so. The only way to know for sure if it'll happen is to have a commenting system in place so people can leave comments.
• Along with the commenting system, I really need to go look into how the Facebook "Like" button and the Google+ "g+" buttons work.
• I really should think about an option for searching the website also.
• I need to finalize all of this so that I can start putting together a content management system (CMS). Even with the few pages I have, it's already getting to a point where I'm having a hard time keeping track of everything I need to update. I also need to start generating an index for the tings I put up since the "What's New" area on the home page and the "Archive" links on the Blog(-like) home page won't be enough. If I try to put everything there, it'll get too long eventually.

Given that I don't want to spend extra money hosting servers and such, I think I'll wind up creating my own CMS. I think I'll some kind of database (I'm thinking a NOSQL database like MongoDB) to store the content and an application I write myself to turn the content into HTML that I can upload to Amazon S3. With the Amazon AWS API, I should be able to automate that part too. It all works so well in my head. I guess I'll find out in a month or two when I hope to have everything done.

andy