My personal website. The various versions and problems with each. This is a central place for all those differnt versions and the lessons learned. I have, of course, a special feeling towards these posts since for the longest time this website was my never ending, ultra important project.
A gallery view of my wonderful website which I never got the chance to finish unfortunately. I will be going though this website in detail to show what I was able to accomplish, what went right/wrong, and how I could have done it better.
A little lesson that will help me and you!
Continue reading »
I do not have an image for my website to show you this time. This is because I lost all of the code for this website a long time ago. It was eventually so horrible that I deleted it. I couldn’t even load the page without errors so I would have had trouble getting a screenshot anyways.
I’ll use this as a chance to explain the pitfalls I encountered making this website and how you should avoid them in your website but also as a history lesson of my old website.
It was created using PHP which I had just learned from Tizag.com. At that time I just learned PHP only and no understanding of how to organize my code. A horrible mistake on my part and which my dad warned me on and I promptly ignored as well. Reason being that I created a website the worked! For the first time ever I made a server-side powered website that actually did something! It was, to say the least, VERY liberating to finally have gotten to the point of making a website. Not to say it looked that great, did much, or even did it well, but it did something.
I can’t remember for sure but I think I could update the pages using a web interface. I could also update certain things that showed up on the website. I do however know I did create a section for people to upload ‘Current Events’. The deal was that our teacher never actually checked the current events. It was just important that we made sure to not all turn in the same one or turn in the same ones every week. However all I made was a place for people to contribute to the place by adding new Current Events. The idea behind that being that if we all created one current event we could alternate between each other and build a collection to use repeatedly. It did not but it was a good try I thought.
However one day during math class, we were using the computers and disaster struck. I loaded my website out of curiosity and clicked a link. All of a sudden my website when in to a crazy error and nothing was working. The whole website crashed and it looked like my login.php was the source of the error. The problem also with this was that login.php was required for the whole website and powered a good deal of the functionality. Most of the website was created with login.php providing the authentication. So you can imagine I just did something to the website that causes this issue to occur. Apparently not because 3 hours later for me and another hour or two with my dad solved no bug…
My website was dead… the cause? SPAGHETTI CODE.
Login.php was a horrible piece of code. I couldn’t figure it out my self either I just knew it worked and that if I kept using the session variables and cookies it set that I could get what I needed and provide the features I wanted. However it was over… the website had died.
Thats when I created my temporary flash website of Chris Portela V7.net so I could create Chris Portela V7.net
I didn’t expect this website to get any more popular but apparently I’m putting together content that people want to read.
Those are the monthly statistics since I’ve started my website. I have not advertised at all and do not provide any services on my website. I think that it’s been going up pretty quickly or at least hasn’t been going down. It reached 532 visitors in May and 443 in June. July is already at 398 and probably going to get close to 500. Now I just need to figure out why my ads aren’t bringing in any money… :\
Currently both ChrisPortela.com and Chris-Portela.com work for both sending me emails and accessing my website. I’ve been wanting to make the switch for a while especially since my Chris-Portela.com domain is a bit harder sell to people. The dash is hard to explain and usually embarrassing.
While I haven’t finished changing all the links to chris-portela.com or anything I know I need to at least change ones on my website. I will be doing this soon.
I hope this new wordpress website will be all I need for my website to function I think its going to be enough finally. After years of making my own website and dealing with the issues of developing it my self entirely I’m DONE. I almost had built my own CMS, Project management, etc website but it was just TOO much for what time I had and I need this website to work. It doesn’t look good if a web developer can’t get his OWN website to work right? Well now I do and I think it looks cool, works well, and be perfect for what I need in the future.
This is a 2D-barcode containing the address of our mobile site.If your mobile has a barcode reader, simply snap this bar code with the camera and launch the site.
