GuestBringing you awesomeness for over a decade! But seriously, on this page I'll describe a little bit about the purpose of this website, the underlying code, the future goals of the website (besides world domination), and last but not(?) least a bit about myself.
Some of this will get slightly technical, so for the non-nerd crowd: brace yourself.
About the site
The main goal of this site is to serve as a bridge of communication between me and my distant family and friends. A mechanism of sharing stories, artwork, photos, music, experiences, and a bit of satire.
The secondary goal of this site is to serve as a playground and hub for my various personal projects, such as: web development, game programming, artwork, photography, music, and whatever the hell else I feel like doing.
About the framework
What's the big deal about this site anyway? It's just a blog like any other blog!
Well, yes and no. Yes, it's just another blog (for now), but no, because I have a lot of features planned that I will be rolling out into the site during the next couple weeks and months. For as long as I've been interested in web development I've attempted to implement the most elegant way of getting my various messages from my mind to the web. This is but a new incarnation of that. As always, I hand code everything, in VIM. No external plugins, frameworks, libraries... All custom built for speed and ease of implementation.
Some of the sweet features of the framework are:
- Loosely MVC - as much as a web framework can adhere to this non-web design pattern
- Built in caching mechanism
- NO ORM, write your own damn SQL! If that's too hard, go learn it!
- Prepared statements, say NO to INJECTION
- Built in almost magic form generation from the Model end
- URL parsing
- Error safe & Lossy XML parsing
- Tiny memory footprint
- Built in AJAX optimizations and one line JS AJAX handling
- Super fast execution (for PHP's standards anyway)
- Easily deployable
- Easily configurable
- Loosely coupled class hierarchy - few dependecies, means more portable!
- and more... hahaha
Where is it available? No where! When will it be available? Some time! Will it be open-sourced? More than likely!
About the future
As I mentioned in the previous section, a lot of features are yet to come. I've spent the longest time building an extremely solid foundation for this application and most of the extensions I'm planning on building will be basically plugins to the current architecture.
The gist of it is: images, galleries, audio, video, friend lists, privacy settings, reasonably advanced-but-lightweight permissions system, and improved unified URL handling, and improved documentation.
Of course this framework / project / site is my baby and it will of course be a never ending project. I hope I won't have to reinvent the wheel for another long ass time, because as much as I love the end result, the road towards it has been long and painful. :)
About the dude
My name's Eric. I was born in '81 - that's right, the month MetallicA formed - and I've been doing the programming thing for over a decade now, and professionally since about the year 2000. I'm constantly trying to learn more things, new technologies, better practices, different fields. Keeps things fresh.
If you don't know much about me yet, that's kinda strange, how did you get to this site then? Get outta here! Basically I'm one of those guys who has a lot of interests and hopes to be reasonably good at a lot of things. I love movies (horror anyone?), art, science, music (thrash metal in case you hadn't figured that out from the audio blog), lots of sports, lots of activities.
Anyway, since this is mostly inteded for friends and family, most of you already know me well enough not to be wasting your time with this section... this whole page for that matter. So...