I’ve recently undertaken the task of refreshing this website. It’s gone through many iterations over the past two decades and I’m looking forward to updating it to better accommodate and reflect my needs and focus.
Looking back to the early days of this site, it was a sandbox for me to apply & mature my web application developing skills, bridging the gap from the ‘traditional’ [locally installed apps, ie JAVA & C++] languages I learned in college to the newly budding, at the time, and always growing since, web application toolkit.
Several years ago, my needs changed. I was deep in back and front end web app development and no longer needed a personal sandbox. I no longer wanted, or needed, to build & maintain a CMS, login functionality, image upload and retrieval functionality, etc…rather I wanted a platform to aggregate and share my experiences.
My initial approach, a few years ago, was to go with WordPress and a robust AWS backend. That was a good learning experience and forced me to focus a lot on my needs, my workflow, my processes….what did I want out of the website, how did I want to go about achieving that. A lot of this had a technical elements but also habitual.
Variables for consideration, when thinking about images [which are apart of the overall content in scope, but just a part]:
- Where & how are images stored
- Where & how do I post process an image
- How are images transferred between storage & editing
- How will I upload images, will I be using a laptop, iPad, etc
- How will the images be displayed and organized
- How will I satisfy my geocoding passion programmatically
- etc, etc, etc
I deployed that website and spent a few months trying to get my process and the technology I had chosen to play well together. I made progress but never got it to a point where it felt sustainable.
So I sat on it, worked on other technology hobby’s and explorations, and now find myself coming back to the need to aggregate content.
The website I deployed a few years ago is still live, up and running under my primary domain name, sitting there idle and lonely.
I write this post from what I hope will be my to-be solution. I believe I have a software and infrastructure approach I can build on to accommodate my needs and vision.
It will still be a while before I consider replacing my existing website with this one, I will continue to spend time adding content and seeing how it fits into my overall process.
Looking forward to seeing where this goes and sharing the progress…ultimately looking more forward to sharing content on items other than my personal website journey.
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