dpritchard.net ¦ misc

Two years ago I knew next to nothing about websites or even how to create one. Since then I have self-taught myself HTML, PHP, MYSQL and a little CSS.

Now designing and building websites is a part-time obsession.

I had wanted this site to be purely self-built. The theory was that it would be a good way to improve my coding skills and, although it would be pretty crappy to begin with, the site would improve slowly as my skills improved. Ultimately I had hoped to build some sort of database-driven site, from the ground-up.

The sad truth is that by the time I achieved that goal I would be a very old man and in the mean time I would have had to have managed the static pages of my site “manually”. Fortunately there are some enormously talented people out there who make their work available for us all to use and enjoy. I have tried most of the major players on the open-source CMS scene, but Textpattern is by far my favourite. It has a reasonably steep learning curve, but once you get over that it is an awesomely powerful platform.

So what you see here is a compromise. Primarily this site is still a proving ground for my skills as a self-taught website builder, but now this happens around an organised core of content.

Most of that content will be boring stuff. You know, the sort of stuff that appeals to me and I am likely to forget. My blog especially will probably just contain random uninteresting information. From time to time I might post up something that could be a useful reference for other people, scientific methods, computer-related how-to’s, stuff like that. Things like that will probably be posted to the articles section.

Regards,
D