New Design, New Application
I've been—who am I kidding? It's been on my backburner for some time—working on cleaning up the code, the application, behind this site for quite a while. In fact, I think my first mention of starting this seemingly arduous task came in the fall of 2007. After several starts and stops, I finally have an excuse to finish the rewrite.
The soon-to-be-released vVersion 1.8 of the Zend Framework is the platform for this blogging application. I decided that my personal website's platform was a suitable candidate for learning the new features, e.g., Zend_Application, since I planned on rewriting the site anyway.
One might be tempted to ask why I am rolling my own blogging engine, or, if I think what I write will be superior to existing products such as Wordpress or ExpressionEngine. To be blatantly honest, I am writing this application for no other reason that to serve as a real-world sandbox to improve my methodologies of using the Zend Framework, and, hopefully, to help others learn in the process. To that end, the blogging engine behind this site will be released as OSS under the New BSD license—the information on accessing the source is coming.
The secondary reason behind the rewrite is I am moving moved hosting providers. Dreamhost has been was a great host in the two years I've been was with them, but my needs have exceed what Dreamhost can offer reasonably. Specifically, I took advantage of Atlassian's recent stimulus package and purchased a starter license for both Jira and Confluence. I want to publicially host these, and, since I don't control the internet connection at my residence, the best solution is to host on my domain(s). Dreamhost does offer a VPS of sorts, but the price-to-power ratio is slightly lower than my chosen provider, Slicehost. This, coupled with having to pay the premium for the VPS and continue paying for basic shared hosting on a monthly basis, made the decision easy.
NOTE: The links below in this post's footer are not active. At this point they are only for presentation but will become active once the application is completed and this notice is removed.