This site has lain stagnant for far too long, and I realized it was time for a change. What better time than right before I change schools?
First, some backstory: I graduated from during my long silence. I now have my bachelor's degrees in computer science and math and will be moving to Champaign Illinois in nine days to begin my graduate career at the .
Because I graduated, my Purdue web account will expire at the end of the summer. I have kept this website for six years; I knew I wanted to keep it going through graduate school and beyond. This meant I needed to find other hosting. I ended up with because I have heard good things about them and they have all the functionality that I wanted for a good price. , , , Unix shell, email, the works.
At first I was just going to move my old site over to the new hosting, but what fun would that be? One of the reasons that I think the old website stagnated was because I was handcuffed by the backend design. Some of you may remember that the site was split into two sections: the "Main" website with my artistic content and the weblog with my writing. What should I do when I wanted to write about an artistic creation? Also, the weblog picture gallery that I wrote was getting unweildy. My parents gave me a as a graduation gift, and I wanted to be able to post a large number of pictures easily. The old website backend made it more difficult than it needed to be.
So I decided to rebuild the website. First, the design. I had a terrible time creating an attractive visual layout. I went through four mockups before deciding on the one you see now.
I also drastically changed the backend. Instead of using my custom-built weblog system, I decided to go with . The application is amazing. I was able to convert the mockup of my design into a custom in just a few hours. Data conversion was even easier: I just wrote a quick SQL query to retrieve posts from my old database and insert them into the WordPress database. Unfortunately, I was unable to transfer the old comments because I did not want to have to mess with re-linking all of them to the posts' new database IDs. Other than that, I do not think it could have gone more smoothly.
I moved the rest of my non-database website content into the gallery and music sections. I completely rebuilt the gallery to integrate it into a WordPress template and support more user interaction. Now one can browse images without having to reload the page. It also supports subgalleries which allow me to display images by simply uploading a folder with XML metadata. It is pretty nice.
So here it is: the lastest version of BrettDaniel.com. What do you think? Please let me know if you have any questions or find any problems.