Observations

Ever since 1998 I’ve built my own website. First it was just plain HTML (or whatever Netscape Composer spat out…) whereas the last version was written in PHP. I’ve always built it myself, more or less from scratch. Granted, some stuff might have been inspired by others… or even blatantly copied, but I always created the pages on my own.

Until now. As I installed WordPress, the era of me (fully) building my own site has ended. Why? Well, plain HTML and PHP doesn’t cut it anymore for me in this day and age, so I would’ve needed a rather complex CMS.

Now, building your own framework or CMS might be educational, but seeing it through is just plain boring. The basic stuff , like how  you go from a request to a page is quite fun IMHO, but making all the useful components for a somewhat functional CMS is just a lot of work… Furthermore, even though I might work for a website as a software engineer, I’m not a web developer: CSS and JavaScript are very useful techniques, but can be such a pain in the ass to work with.

I considered going for a Play application as a website. I even completed their step-by-step tutorial of a blog engine, which is so easy a monkey can do it. But the name they used (Yet Another Blog Engine) pretty much summed up the futility of the whole thing: why bother building something which half the world has already tried and mostly failed at? Don’t get me wrong, I’d still consider it for anything that requires anything a little more customization than a simple blog. And still, all of the CSS I would’ve had to do myself.

So, WordPress it was going to be. Mostly because that was the first one that came to mind. I already hate my decision, cause I had a quick look under the hood… PHP 4-style OO, loose functions, no camelCasing. Let’s say it’s not the kind of code I would’ve written… but it works.

And that is sufficient.

For now…