The Sheen Project (copy of original index.html; December 5, 2023)

Thank you for enjoying this very boring test page.

Please allow me a moment while I decide which path to follow:

The quick and easy development with a CMS.
Advantages:
  • Faster
  • More functionality and pleasing styling from the outset
  • Low chance of loosing enthusiasm before reaching a minimum standard of functionality and appeal
Disadvantages:
  • Boring as a development project
  • Defeats a desire for building low level development skills and understanding
  • I personally have a preference for knowing what is happening under the hood and see proprietary managed systems as black boxes with opaque functionality and agendas (that's not a bad thing, just not what I'm interested in)
  • I don't want web development to become How to choose and use a CMS. That locks your development experience into a software user view of the process and it is much harder to extrapolate that out to broader skills than it is to interpolate broader skills to the use of any future chosen rapid development system
55%
Laboriously start from first principles and hand craft with HTML (and whatever else I decide to use).
Advantages:
  • Less boring in terms of development challenges
  • Completely transparent functionality (for the developer anyway, which would be me)
  • Not limited to the bundled functionalities available in some chosen CMS and plugins (although writing a new plugin is an option, but not one I'm interested in)
  • An opportunity to advance personal experience and knowledge in a development technology I've been side-stepping for decades
Disadvantages:
  • Increased chance of waning enthusiasm in times when technical issues become overwhelming
  • Much longer development time and effort to achieve a minimum quality website with a pleasing appeal
  • Time restraints (the unkonwn amount of time I will have to dedicate to this in the future)
75%

Note: A few bullet points on the advantages and disadvantages of each can be viewed by clicking on them.

A Decision Has Been Made

The verdict is in, and it has been decided to write my own platform.

Various CMS utilities are readily available for an easy installation and setup, along with countless tutorials for getting them ready to use and selecting/customising themes to suit your taste. I have read about some of them, and contemplated a few.

Motivation

I have never written a blog before, although I have read some posts on various ones that came up in web searches while researching topics. I have read many forum posts on many topics, and being a programmer, I have seen a fair share of StackExchange questions and answers.

When developing software applications, I sometimes get lazy and don't bother with any kind of documentation, powering on while all the ideas are still fresh in my mind until the application gets to the point where ... It works!. This is a regular trap I fall into when I'm just trying to get a simple utility up and running to perform a few rudimentary tasks. You know, for the kind of tasks that don't seem all that technical but exhaustingly repetitive. At the time their functionality seems plain obvious, so the thought Why bother documenting? quickly pops up, then quickly runs away as the adopted strategy.

There have been times when the lazy lack of documentation has come back to bite me, resulting in an equal, and opposite, reaction. Think Documentation bordering on Encylopedic Mania.

Intention

The purpose of this website is to be a centralised hub for a good selection of projects that occupy my mind (if not all, but let's start somewhere first). The brain needs a dump! It all has to go somewhere, and why not a website? Up until now, everything has been archived on some hard drive, and occassionally accidently deleted, or even just destroyed by some abnormal collision with an unforgiving hard surface.

Question

Why not Cloud Storage?

Answer

That is a very good solution for the artifacts of my labour, but it isn't really the artifact that occupies my concerns. To be honest, I don't care too much about what it is I produce. What really interests me is how it works and how I made it happen.

After loosing something I've worked extremely hard on, I'm surprised to find that what I miss the most is not the finished product, but actually the work I put into it. The research, the analysis that culminates to making some kind of decision, results of making decisions, where the work was heading.

Why a Website?

Partly just for the mere space to put it all, but a significant part is also because I want to share. There is GIT, which is great! A website can incorporate a GIT repository, but is also a great way to engage with others and exchange ideas and experience. Let's face it. I'm not the most amazing developer, so I'm hoping to learn from others. I do have some experience though, and I'm sure there are people out there hungry to feed from the experience of people doing similar things that interest them.

With a website I can do lots of things:

  • Blog about what I'm planning/doing, and get other people's opinion about it.
  • Host a forum for people to discuss things that relate to the stuff I'm interested in.
  • Share projects I'm working on, and possibly collaborate with other interested people.
  • Store documentation and related reference material/links for easy access (both myself and anyone else in on the game).
  • Basically just have contact with people and share.

Plan

To start with, this website is Project #1. I want to get a blog up and going where I can discuss the processes of this website's development. Other people interested in a similar thing can follow along, and I can get some feedback and advice.

I haven't created a blogging platform before, so I need to research it. I'll share that research.

The intended scripting language is PHP and it will be MySQL for databases.

Once a functional blogging platform is operational this will revert to a homepage and act as a welcome and a hub to the modules the website provides.