For years I've advised clients that off-the-shelf web site software is great, but that you need to absolutely stay on top of security updates or being hacked is a Google search away. For my personal web site, those rules never really applied - I barely had the time to update my blog let alone code a custom one.
Then a friend sent me those fatal words "for a professional web site programmer, it doesn't look good that your own site has been hacked ;-)" - lo and behold not only was my previous site down and a simple message 'w3 0wnz U' or something similarly childish, but they'd installed a 'rootkit' on my server.
Removing the rootkit wasn't too hard - a fair bit of searching and rebuilding on Gentoo worked a treat. I know the normal advice is to wipe the machine and start again, but to be honest this is only a test machine and hosts websites for a few friends. So then the only thing left was what to do about my site...
Of course, given that my data was already in the right place and I
had backups of my site from before the hack, the easiest answer was to
restore, update the blog software and monitor it more closely in future.
That was the easiest option - but since I've been using Symfony at IPC Media Ltd I've wanted to custom-code my own blog site. This was the perfect opportunity.
I'm not a designer. Anyone that's ever met me knows this!!! So when
it came to a design for the site, I realistically had three choices:
Fortunately I came across a great site - JeffCroft.com.
I've basically made a simpler version of his design, borrowing greatly
from his expertise in crafting a decent design and probably making mine
ugly in the process. So a big thank you to Jeff (even though I didn't
get his permission to take inspiration from his design).
For the record I copied none of the code (either the HTML/CSS nor
hacked his site to get at the server-side code) of his site, just
implemented a similar look and feel from scratch.
Anyway, I hope you like the new site. I'll be adding new
functionality over the coming months as this now gives me a great base
to work from. For now there is no commenting functionality on the site,
so if you have any feedback feel free to use my Contact details.
2 Comments so far
Ahad Bokhari wrote on 28 November 2008 at 09:14
Andy,
I come from a Flash/XHTML background, and within that territory I also understand how to develop my own themes for the Joomla's, WP's, TextPattern's out there. But thats more of the "Front End" crowd..
In my limited knowledge, i do know its very seldom that people excel at both front-end and back-end practices. With that being said there are some people who like getting their hands dirty...
Im glad to hear you are bridging the gap between your "EXPERT" development skills and designing a good front end - Im sure it will pay off soon!!
Sheesh if you can use Symfony / Zend, add all business logic and design a nice front-end you I think you will feel a "GREAT" sense of satisfaction/achievment + mad respect from both sides.
BTW i like this design, especially the styled tags
on your sidebars - Now that shows you are already "DEVELOPING" better design habits ;-)
ok onwards to my testing symfony out after much failure last night..Build baby Build ;-)
Andy Jeffries wrote on 28 November 2008 at 09:32
@Ahad: Thanks for the comments on the design. However, before going in to Symfony I'd recommend you read two of the other articles on here: http://andyjeffries.co.uk/articles/why-i-think-ruby-on-rails-is-an-ideal-web-development-environment and http://andyjeffries.co.uk/articles/rebuilding-a-site-from-symfony-to-rails
Personally, I feel that Rails is a much more rounded development environment and not that difficult to pick up (if you can use Symfony, you can use Rails with a bit of learning Ruby's syntax).
Click here to have your say...