"I'm blogging this" questions

UncleChet

So, I've decided to go and do a personal blog thing again. The difference is, I'm planning on doing most of it hand coded or custom coded as much as I can, just so I can get the experience. I'm working in a mixture of MS Expression and HTML/CSS. Should I bother with trying to reinvent the wheel and build everthing from the ground up, or should I get something like a blogger or wordpress frame work and tweak it?

I currently have a blogger blog for it running, just to get a feel for content, tags, colors and stuff, but I'm childish and want things like my own favicon and a navbar that doesn't link to random google blogs.

My CSS experience is limited but my googlefu is strong.

Thanks!

adytum

You can write an entire website and insert *1* line of PHP to have blogger publish to it.

Reinventing the wheel is how you're going to learn HTML/CSS/PHP so if that's what you're interested in, go for it.

Jimmy King

It really depends on what your skillset is and what you want to get out of it. To truly build everything from the ground up you're going to back end software development skills, database skills, and the front end skills. If you don't have those skills and don't want them, then doing it from the ground up is right out. If you don't have the skills but would like to develop them, then you've got a long, hard road ahead of you that will be very rewarding at the end.

I've built my own CMSes from the ground up for a few different purposes in Tcl, Perl, Java, and ASP.Net using C#. A very basic CMS that does not need to have 10 million plugins and features and be everything to everyone is fairly straightforward and simple to build. You can learn a lot while doing it and even more a year later when you go back to your first CMS to add some new functionality and wonder what the fuck you were thinking at the time.

adytum

What I meant to say was:

If you want to learn HTML/CSS/PHP you should write everything from that end from the ground up, then use blogger or something similar and that one line of code to actually publish / manage the blog.

Database stuff is hard.

UncleChet

Thanks for the replies folks. I used to know HTML back in the day. I'm brushing up on it and totally learning CSS new. Is it PHP code that organizes evertying into a timeline and allows you to update and tag and stuff? Blogger's been convenient so far, and I'm toying with wordpress, but I want to customize the look, input my own header, my own icons and stuff like that. I've been reading up on good disign theory and stuff like that. This is not intended to be some huge thing, just a hobby site for me, not even monetized.

adytum

PHP lets you write a HTML framework and then stick in a line of code that inserts a separate file into the HTML file

So you have all your code and then insert=blogger.php

And whatever blogger.php is will be inserted in its entirety.

It just makes it so you can manage your design with HTML and manage your content separately with Blogger

Circa

adytum wrote: »

PHP lets you write a HTML framework and then stick in a line of code that inserts a separate file into the HTML file

So you have all your code and then insert=blogger.php

And whatever blogger.php is will be inserted in its entirety.

It just makes it so you can manage your design with HTML and manage your content separately with Blogger

?

PHP is a full-blown scripting language, specifically geared for web development. In a very basic definition it's a human-readable series of computer commands that you write to make your website dynamic.

In creating a blog like you've suggested, PHP or a similar programming language would be the gears behind your website. HTML and CSS are tools just to make websites look prettier. They are used for aesthetic purposes. In a well-coded blog, the PHP or whatever language is what will let you dynamically post and manage blog entries, as well as letting your users dynamically sort through them, post comments, etc.

Coding a basic blog like this isn't that hard, and you'd learn a ton. It'd be awhile before you had a fully functioning blog however, and you might get discouraged along the way. It's a bit of a large project to undertake for someone with no prior programming experience, but it's a straight-forward job for anyone with more than brief exposure to web programming.

You could do what adytum has suggested, although in that case all you get is custom is a template. You'd just be coding the template, then using Blogger and it's services to actually manage your content. If this is what your looking for, most major blog software offers some kind of support for taking their software to a new website.

With enough dedication you could hard-code it all from scratch. I imagine your main concern, once your familiar with programming, is going to be security. You're also going to need to familiarize yourself with databases. MySQL or prostegeSQL or something in that vein. Depending on how "modern" and feature-rich you want your blog to be, you might eventually want to look into AJAX or at least Javascript.

If you want a really nice, high-functioning blog for serious use, I'd recommend Wordpress or something similar. If you're just looking to have a bit of an experiment and want a simple blog without many features, have fun and good luck making your own.

I can't really point you to any good tutorials off the top of my head. If you just google "learning php" or "learning css" you should find something passable to get you started.

UncleChet

Ya'all are awesome, Thanks so much. So far blogger has let me manage colors and customize and the only thing I dislike is the blogger toolbar across the top and little niggling things like that. I'm sure once I register my domain and get a host, blogger will let me export the site to it, and continue to use them as a back end. Or at least I hope. I have a mostly forgotten background in relational databases and SQL and dabbled in MySQL back in the day. I also have a passing interest in programming and scripting. It's all very exciting to me, but I get lost/distracted often and easily.

GothicLargo

adytum wrote: »

Database stuff is hard.

It's not hard, it's just really easy to do wrong. In most circumstances, if you've got a table with more then 5 columns in it, you're probably doing something wrong. Not always, but often. Just something I've learned at work over the years.

Great book. Better then the db book my lecturer printed back in college because this one has pictures.