php blues

I killed my main site, celeb-tech.com, yesterday. It had been around for a while and even its intended visitors (mainly friends and family) were bored with it. And I knew that unless I junked the old site, the new one would never get made. I am lazy by nature (so really, its not my fault, its ‘by nature’ – read it again), and as a rule, I don’t fix things till they are broken. Now at least there is a rush to get things done. My mother already called me in the afternoon to remind me to fix it soon. Hmm… I wonder how people managed before the net.
I did want to make the new site exclusively in php and mySQL but I was overconfident. I thought it’d be close enough to HTML and its variants to for me to figure it out as I went along. It isn’t. I am from a design background in commercial printing and for me HTML was bad enough as far as layout was concerned. I was used to 20 million colors and micrometer precise layouts. I was barely getting comfortable with CSS when php came along. It is worse. It may be easier but the control is less, at least for me because I am nowhere near as proficient as I’d like to be.
So I’m learning and I am trying. It could be a while before I see a properly working page. My technical advisor (and my closest friend from childhood, ok, first… mmm, second day of college) lives in Taiwan and he is not too pleased with my progress. He wanted this done last year but he knows my habits and his legs aren’t long enough to reach here and kick my ass. And he doesn’t read my blog. So I should be safe for a while.
I went down to the local computer book store and bought a dummies series book on php. I found it to be surprisingly good value for money and I find myself learning more from it than I expected. At least it progressively gets complicated so I can re-read the stuff I get confused about.
One thing I am sure about this time is the layout. I don’t want to flash this and animate that. This time I want simple and I want clean. I had made several designs with flash and animations but somehow never liked them enough to actually upload them to the server. Now I am glad I didn’t. The concept of good design is the same in both print and online. Simple looks the best but sometimes simplicity is so difficult to achieve and bells & whistles so much easier. I guess the same is true in life as well.
Last time, one of my biggest mistakes with my site was to assume that the people who make online photo album software must be experts. I found out the hard way that while they may be great at programming, they suck at image manipulations. But by that time my online gallery was full of horribly pixilated family photos. No matter how hard I tried, the software automatically resized and recompressed them as soon as they were uploaded. Nasty program.
No more. This time I am sticking to whatever I make myself. Good or bad, at least the mistakes will be mine and mine alone. I can live with that.