Hicham Maged's blog Inquisitive curiosity paves knowledge path

Me, Myself and Websites

One of the nice coincidences for people who live at the beginning of any century is passing by unique Georgian dates like today’s 09-09-09, so I dedicate this post for technical reflection on three development phases during my journey in website designing, three geek tips on website maintenance and two geek events.

Website Designing: Development Phases

I started my journey many years ago in the world of website designing process. Nevertheless, I have not run into professional website developing as a career because it is not my scope of living, as I do so my own discovery in the technology world!

As of writing this blog entry in the year 2009, I passed by three main phases that shaped my journey while dealing with this website designing process:

1. Phase I: Static Websites (amateur).
2. Phase II: Dynamic Websites (amateur).
3. Phase III: Dymanic Websites (semi-professional).

Me, Myself and Websites

Phase I: Static Websites

I started to discover this world around the age of 17. I recall how I used to self-educate myself about such process via creating/editing HTML codes after spending many hours of my spare time just to figure out what is going on and working in creating virtual spaces for myself over free-hosting like “GeoCities” – remember?

Hereby, I enjoyed using the “man-made” style which means writing down the HTML code manually then testing on the legacy beloved Netscape Navigator which was my favorite browser during the 1990s, so you can categorize this under the concept of “Static Websites” depending on HTML coding only.

Phase II: Dynamic Websites as an Amateur

It started at the turning point of the new century by switching to PHP/MySQL duet which was fascinating for me indeed; the idea of having “Dynamic Websites” means another dimension of web-designing, so I used to check with software like PHPNuke, ArabPortal and others software. The theme of this phase was checking free hosting that supports this duet in order to work with my stuff.

Consequently, I went through the local server testing process to understand how stuff goes while designing my amateur trials for personal websites. Hereby I discovered both of WampServer and XAMPP Server as essential tools for creating beta testing environment, in parallel with Notepad++ (npp) for creating/editing files.

Phase III: Dymanic Websites as Semi-Professional

Later on, phase three started when I discovered WordPress in 2004. I love it as my blogging software but since I did not have my domain till 2006 so I used to try it on local server till I got it self-hosted in this beloved blog.In parallel, I started looking for a good “Content Management System (CMS)” to operate my official websites, so I ran into testing different Open Source software to choose among before officially launching the site. Hence, my watch list included Drupal, Mambo and Joomla! in 2005/2006.

I however found the later very promising so I picked the stable release at this time Joomla 1.0 to manage my websites since 2006 and have been impressed by the flexibility of the software. Additionally, it was nice that both “Nashiri” and “I-MAG Magazine” – where I publish my articles – are also implementing Joomla! as the default CMS.

Nowadays at the first quarter of the 21^st century, I am wondering what other phases I might go through in the future while dealing with myself with websites phases.

Note: If you are interested, you can check the blog entry entitled Blue: A New Look to know more about my journey for customizing a WordPress theme for my blog!

Geek Events: Happy Birthday Joomla!

Joomla! turned 4 years old few days ago. I am neither developer nor software programmer yet it is like watching your baby grows and same goes too for WordPress as it is turning 6 years old. Hereby, during these geek events, I want to thank the core team developers for making life easier for end-users like us as both software are free under GPL license.

I however think that nothing is 100% free because developers spent time in creating, managing, developing this for us. Same goes for plugins, extensions add-ons, and themes developers.

Thank you guys!

• Happy 4th Birthday to Joomla! J! Community Blog

Geek Tips on Website Maintenance

Creating, running and maintaining a successful website is a both time and effort consuming, hence I would like to share the following three geek tips for end-users like me to keep in mind regardless the CMS:

1. Backup your files and database on regularly;
2. Download your copies of core/plugings/themes from the official websites only;
3. Keep your software updated to the most recent version to avoid hacking. Laziness might kill your site!

Before ending this post, I mention that despite I am enjoying the process of managing my websites + blog, it sometimes make me confused when I log into Joomla and wonder where the heck is the WordPress dashboard or vice-versa but this is the tax you pay for multi-tasking since nothing is 100% free anyway.

Finally, I would like to end with the following quote:

Related Quotes and Sayings

In any case, whenever technical progress opened a new window into the surrounding world, I felt the urge to look through this window, hoping to see something unexpected. — Bruno Rossi

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Tags: geek events, geek tips
Categories: Tech
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