Technical aspects of this website

As I said, I will make some general comments about the technical nature of this website.

Apparently, some people are interested in how it was done.

OK, currently, this website is hosted on servers over in Singapore. It used to be held on servers in Austin, Texas, but for various reasons, it was moved.

Those who know me will not be surprised to hear that I adopt the LAMP principle when it comes to websites, i.e. I use Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP.

The website itself uses a Content Management System provided by WordPress and it uses the Magazine Basic theme.

There are advantages and disadvantages to using a pre-rolled CMS.

The main advantage is the speed with which a website can be put up. There is no messy code to write and debug. With WordPress, one can immediately start adding content within 5-10 mins if one so desires.

The main disadvantage with pre-rolled is when one gets pedantic and wants a specific look and feel to the site. This requires a bit of reading about how the theme works and some knowledge of PHP, HTML and CSS.

For example, I did not like the white background colour as I felt that it was too glary. It was relatively trivial to adjust it to black (yes, Mercy, now you know why I use black).

But using black as a background meant that some features of the theme do not show up too well, eg the posts use a font where the stroke-fill is black.

I mean, black words on a black background make it very difficult to read the brilliant discourse I have just written on the synaptic responses experienced from the use of Batu Laut seawater in the manufacture of belacan.

Here is where a knowledge of CSS becomes useful as I am able to go to the style sheet, find the section which deals with fonts and change the stroke-fill colour of the font to something with better contrast, in this case, a light grey or #AAA in CSS nomenclature.

But then, website customisation is inevitable regardless of whether one chooses to start from scratch or from pre-rolled.

Hopefully, in the days to come, I will be able to add more stuff to this website and make it look a bit nicer than it is.

Some nice-to-have things will be a customised front page, a site map, a widget to advise subscribers of new postings and a better breadcrumb trail which does not need a “.” as a placeholder πŸ™‚

I am also considering user-contributed articles on interesting subjects so I am open to suggestions here.

Websites are a dime a dozen.

Good websites are a bit more difficult to come by and they require a lot of work at the technical level and lots of effort to market the product.

For me at the moment, I am satisfied that I am using industry-standard software to create this website. I am reasonably confident the website will survive the most rigorous inspection of its’ security measures and conformity to the standards of the World Wide Web Consortium.

Again, I would like to thank you, the reader, for coming along to my website, and I sincerely hope that you will participate in making this website just that little better than it was yesterday πŸ™‚

P.S. The logo you see at the top of the page has no special significance. It was created with Inkscape and is merely a doodle to test what Inkscape could do. I also use The GIMP (yes, Lukas, I know you can kill me any day with the Adobe suite).

11 comments for “Technical aspects of this website

  1. Mercy Hu
    September 14, 2015 at 4:37 pm

    A good start and wonderful sharing.

    • moses
      September 15, 2015 at 12:02 am

      So, there you go, Mercy πŸ™‚

      I know it is very short on the technical details you want but let me know what you are after and I’ll see what I can do.

      Like I said, I am open to suggestions from this point on πŸ™‚

  2. Mercy Hu
    September 15, 2015 at 1:10 am

    This website can see your effort. It’s interesting and I’m looking forward for the new posts. Keep it up , you can be ta good web developer.

    • moses
      September 15, 2015 at 1:25 am

      Thank you for your encouragement πŸ™‚

      Pls do subscribe to be informed of new posts which I will be making.

      You and your students are quite welcomed to contribute interesting articles for publication.

      • Mercy Hu
        September 15, 2015 at 1:30 am

        Good idea. What kind of articles do you prefer ? How to post?

        • moses
          September 15, 2015 at 1:45 am

          Any type of interesting articles πŸ™‚

          Why don’t you think of some suggestions? Good fishing spots around Sg Pelek and Tanjung Sepat? How to make mooncakes? How to break thru 6 inches of concrete with a teaspoon? Anything πŸ™‚

          Well, almost anything πŸ™‚

          • Mercy Hu
            September 16, 2015 at 12:10 am

            Ok. Type in word or html file? Can support video? II’m interested in my life style. It’s really good topic.

          • moses
            September 16, 2015 at 10:31 am

            OK, I’ve made you a contributor to the site.

            I think I will need to provide a login option on the front page, so I’ll look at how to do so.

            From the WordPress Codex :-

            “Contributor

            A Contributor can create and edit only their own posts, but cannot publish them. When one of their posts is ready to be published or has been revised, the Administrator needs to be notified personally by the Contributor to review it. Furthermore, once a Contributor’s post is approved and published by an Administrator, it can no longer be edited by the Contributor.

            Contributors do not have the ability to upload files or images, but they can see your site’s stats.”

          • moses
            September 16, 2015 at 10:36 am

            Yes, video is supported.

            But nobody would carry a video on their website because of space considerations unless the video is privileged or exclusive.

            The smarter way is to upload the video on YouTube and use the embedded player code to display the video.

            You may wish to check the WordPress documentation for embedding the player code or I can do it for you when I have something to run testing on.
            =================
            Update

            The embedding for YouTube is trivial – you just copy and paste the link and voila the embedding is done automagically πŸ™‚

  3. Mercy Hu
    September 16, 2015 at 1:14 pm

    Thanks for adding me as one of the contributor. I’ll follow your link. Please check my work before you post it:)

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