Hicham Maged's blog Acquiring knowledge lead to the acquisition of power

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 to some techi reflections that shall deal with creating websites.

Development Phases

As of writing this, I passed by 3 main phases that shaped my journey while dealing with this process for my own discovery however I wonder what other phases I might go through in the future? Anyway let us deal with what we have.

Phase I

I started to discover this world around the age of 17. I recall how I used to self-educate myself about such process via legacy ‘HTML’ pages 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?

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 favourite browser druing the 1990s. You can categorise this under the concept of ‘Static Websites’ depending on HTML coding only.

Phase II

It started at the turning point of the new century by switching to PHP/MySQL duet which was fascinating for me; the idea of having ‘Dynamic Website’ was very interesting, so I used to check with software like PHPNuke, ArabPortal and others. The theme of this phase was checking free hosting that supports this duet in order to work with my stuff.

Phase III

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 website(s), so I ran into testing different Open Source software to choose among before officially launching the site.

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 ‘J1.0’ to manage my website(s) since 2006 and have been impressed by the flexibility of the software. Consequently it was nice that ‘Nashiri’ and I-MAG Magazine’ where I publish articles also implementing Joomla! as the default CMS.

Happy Birthday

Joomla! turned 4 years old few days ago. I am neither developer nor software programmer yet it is like watching your baby grow up. Same goes too for WordPress as it is turning 6 years old. Hereby, 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! [ ]

Tech Notes

I want to end this post with mentioning 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. [ ] Anyway, this is the tax you pay for multi-tasking since nothing is free as I mentioned up. [ ]

Nevertheless, I have one final note for end-users like me: keep in your mind the following regardless the CMS:

• BackUP, BackUP and BackUP your files and database;
• Download your copies of core/plugings/themes from the official websites only;
• Keep your software updated to the most recent version to avoid hacking. Laziness might kill your site!

“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]

Related Posts

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

Related Sites

• Hicham Maged Website [English]
• Hicham Maged Website [Arabic]
• I-MAG Magazine [English]
• Nashiri E-Publishing House [Arabic]

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