eJoneClicks.com

I first came up with the idea for eJoneClicks.com in January, I had a rough idea of how I want it to look like, based on other IT-related technical websites I came across during my usual everyday clicks. It has been a while since I last sat down and developed a website.

I was shocked to find how much the world wide web has changed in terms of style, development and engineering. The last time I touched a piece of HTML code was when I first started work after graduating back in 1998. Back then, a typical website would require the following things :

1. Storage Space - 15Mb was tremendously huge compared to what web-hosting companies are offering today. You could usually fit an average size company’s website on a single floppy disk without any problems. This was probably due to the fact that everybody was still on a dial-up connection back then. I remember when text and pictures magically appear on my web browser as they were downloaded. Nowadays a typical web page is downloaded almost instantly with the help from broadband.
2. Graphic Tool - Back then, the only image type that can be displayed on a web browser was the GIF format which was developed by CompuServe. Even the Paint program that came with Windows 95 did not support it. Several programs were available for download from the Internet (if you had the patience to download them of course) and I think it was that time I first came across Paint Sho Pro 5.1 (current release is 10) from Jasc (now owned by Corel). Ah, the days of 256 colours.
3. HTML editor - Notepad. That was my favourite editor. Oh and perhaps Pico (part of the text-based Pine email program for Unix) whenever I was working on a Unix workstation. Later I switched to WYSIWYG and used Microsoft FrontPage for a while, but went back to Notepad when I could no longer stand all the additional and unnecessary codes that inserted by FrontPage. I later discovered Macromedia’s Dreamweaver 3.0 (now owned by Adobe) and was impressed by how it hides all the javascripts from the user. It also allowed you to switch back to HTML view in case you’re curious how it was done or just plain fussy about your codes.

That was 8 years ago though. Those were much simpler times. I haven’t looked or winked at any HTML code since, until late 2005 when I rediscovered blogging. Times have changed and the HTML I knew has extended into XHTML, CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and PHP (too many to mention here). Templates and databases have made things even easier as you can modify and change the design or layout of your website without re-entering the data or content. Web pages are no longer static; everything is constructed and displayed ‘on the fly’ i.e. the content is delivered dynamically.

Today, eJoneClicks.com itself has 5Gb’s worth of storage space and is powered by the popular Wordpress publishing platform. The design and layout was picked from one of the many templates (or themes) available for Wordpress, and I made really small modifications (and possibly broke) to bits here and there to my liking. Wordpress itself needs PHP and MySQL as a minimum requirement. There are not currently a lot of images at the moment, but most of them can either be downloaded from the Internet, created using Adobe Photoshop or taken and cropped with a digital camera.

In the last three weeks, re-entering the world of web design and development has been an engaging experience for me. I’ve managed to pick up a little bit of CSS and PHP by looking at sample templates and going through the many support forums on the Internet.

The web is indeed, a marvel in technology.

And thus, my journey begins.