In the past few months I have had a crash course in Ajax and then had to branch out to PHP because my dad(whose website I built and maintain) wanted a blog,too.
Ajax and JQuery made it possible to put some really neat image effects on the site with LightBox and I even attempted ThickBox but apparently I’m too thick for ThickBox(haha).And since I wasn’t sure of what all it could do I researched on maybe getting it to work as a blog.But it was only good for calling HTML pages into a div or frame.And HTML pages are static.And we all want a blog to be interactive,archived and RSS-able.This meant I just had to knuckle down and get with PHP.I could’ve gone with asp but on my dad’s host asp is a mystery.They say they support it yet they seem not to as all the asp test scripts I’ve tried out just show plain text or a blank page.
The one thing that was preventing me from trying a PHP powered blog was the hand in hand way it functions with MYsql. Again the preventative was the site’s host: they want more money a month for it and we already pay enough, I think. It’s all to do with what you think your business needs in a website anyway. And if you make a lot of money it would be totally worth it to pay more for your site. But my dad’s business is really small.
His books(that’s his business) sell, and are searched for in Google but it isn’t like they sell every day.So we need to keep the overhead low. I’ve begun trying to research how to get his site to make money… in other ways but right now we don’t want any ads on his pages.
Because his business is books Google no doubt would read “books” and have ads for Amazon or even (gasp) Barnes and Noble…and given the history between my dad and those 2 businesses this would be a major conflict and a major contradicition.
I forged ahead in looking for a simple no mysql php blog and found one: simplePHPblog, just like my search’s key words. Pretty cool.
It all began very promisingly, the install went like a dream.But again the host caused problems.I had to mess with the code a lot to get it to work on the site.I mean mess.
It works to date although I get nervous and test it often.The most twitchy bit is the contact me page.I think the way they have configured it to need cookies to run makes it twitchy because sometimes people disable them or your own computer’s virus protection does something strange with them.But 7 out of 10 times the contact page works…and that’s pretty alright for now.
Of course the ideal is 10 out of 10 times 100 percent functionality and we all know how something broken on a site makes people go away…but on the other hand being interactive is really important.So it’s ok for now that the contact page is wonky.Because the comments bit for a blog and the RSS-abilty are way more important. And I have a contactme in PHP that works 100 percent that I can always put back on the site. Right now contacting my dad is super easy .His phone number and email and a few forms are all there to choose from.
I just wish he’d blog a lot more! I keep telling him to write a little every day and that the blog can be light hearted and even sometimes a little trivial.
He’s a fantastic cook for instance and I’d love it if he would post some of his recipes.
I’d love it if he didn’t treat every entry like like it had to be an example of Strunk and White.But there you go: you can build it but they may not blog it.