Sunday, July 19, 2009

A New Look for JaredHatfield.com

I wrote a custom PHP script for the first version of my personal home page on the Internet. It collected several RSS feeds from social media sites and displayed them in one location. The page simply collected all of my posts from my blog, Twitter, Digg, and YouTube. While this page served its function, technically, it was riddled with problems.


First off, it was very slow. It requested multiple remote feeds which was at the mercy of the remote server. The feeds were cached, but when they needed to be fetched, which happened to be synchronized, the page would take almost 10 seconds to render.

The other major problem is my lack of ability to make a good looking website or write a single line of CSS that improves the visual appeal of a website. While the page didn't look terrible, it did not stand up to the quality that I wanted.

My solution was to simply abandon my custom page. My main page now points directly to my personal wiki which hosts information about various projects that I have worked on along with other code samples that I have published. To make up for it I added support to embed RSS feeds.

Overall this should help encourage me to post more on my blog and publish some of the old projects that I have worked on.

No comments:

Powered By Blogger