Chris Portela.com

My personal website. The various versions and problems with each. This is a central place for all those differnt versions and the lessons learned. I have, of course, a special feeling towards these posts since for the longest time this website was my never ending, ultra important project.

I like WordPress a lot. It’s a pretty awesome setup I got going here. I don’t have to deal with pretty much anything, I just drag and drop things in places and stuff pretty much works. Plus if I need anything really spiffy I just download a plugin to do it for me. No special work on my part it seems, and would be entirely accurate. I haven’t coded a line of my website. For a long time I thought this would be an awesome thing. For one, this would be a totally social friendly thing. Things post to WordPress pretty easily too. However lately I’ve been thinking differently.

Some issues with WordPress are the following

The editor is slow and would be better if it used markup instead of HTML. That way I can know, easily, that what I am coding will show up in a certain way. So I disabled the editor and now I code the whole post by hand how I like it. However that gets very cluttered and is why I often do not put pictures when I have the pictures ready on my computer for uploading. It’s just annoying to me.

If I want to post to any other place, like twitter or Facebook, it’s an uphill battle. Also it’s a pain to get Facebook to have all the social network buttons I want and how I want them.

I do not want to mix all my posts. If I am posting about non-sense I want it split away from my posts about politics. There isn’t any need for me to feel restricted from making a serious post because right under it is a picture about a guy beating himself with a hammer (for the record I don’t have a post like that, but I should…).

Places like tumblr and twitter have awesome ideas about blogging. However why are they not in my blog as well? THAT would be a cool blog wouldn’t it? I think I should have a feature to pull twitter and tumblr posts to my blog and show them there for both archive and centralized reasons. Those posts should obviously look different as well.

But probably one of the worst things I have with WordPress is how it handles other part of my website. For instance if I wanted to have a page that isn’t viewed except by direct access. Or even more importantly a part of my website that better shows my various projects appropriately. WordPress requires too much learning to do what is a simply website design job (simple in comparison I mean). It has it’s own developer codex! and it’s big! I mean I know I like to learn things but learn WordPress? When I could be learning Java, Python, Linux, or a host of other things that I am actually interested in? No thank you.

I would also like my website to look… simple. I mean it’s pretty simply already, but I sort of like the Craig’s List type look or the old gmail look. Links, smaller text, and just the good ol’ web looking look. Something fast, cool, and simple. I can’t just change that on WordPress…unless someone already made it. Right now I am using a very customizable website template but it’s a lot work to understand it and set it up. It makes plenty of website design simpler but it’s really complicated in it’s own right too.

I just feel like I need a new website to meet needs I didn’t realize WordPress couldn’t easily handle. We shall see what I do because I am not sure what I am going to do but feel like a new blog post wouldn’t be a bad idea.

A gallery view of my wonderful website which I never got the chance to finish unfortunately. I will be going though this website in detail to show what I was able to accomplish, what went right/wrong, and how I could have done it better.

A little lesson that will help me and you!
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I do not have an image for my website to show you this time. This is because I lost all of the code for this website a long time ago. It was eventually so horrible that I deleted it. I couldn’t even load the page without errors so I would have had trouble getting a screenshot anyways.

I’ll use this as a chance to explain the pitfalls I encountered making this website and how you should avoid them in your website but also as a history lesson of my old website.

It was created using PHP which I had just learned from Tizag.com. At that time I just learned PHP only and no understanding of how to organize my code. A horrible mistake on my part and which my dad warned me on and I promptly ignored as well. Reason being that I created a website the worked! For the first time ever I made a server-side powered website that actually did something! It was, to say the least, VERY liberating to finally have gotten to the point of making a website. Not to say it looked that great, did much, or even did it well, but it did something.

I can’t remember for sure but I think I could update the pages using a web interface. I could also update certain things that showed up on the website. I do however know I did create a section for people to upload ‘Current Events’. The deal was that our teacher never actually checked the current events. It was just important that we made sure to not all turn in the same one or turn in the same ones every week. However all I made was a place for people to contribute to the place by adding new Current Events. The idea behind that being that if we all created one current event we could alternate between each other and build a collection to use repeatedly. It did not but it was a good try I thought.

However one day during math class, we were using the computers and disaster struck. I loaded my website out of curiosity and clicked a link. All of a sudden my website when in to a crazy error and nothing was working. The whole website crashed and it looked like my login.php was the source of the error. The problem also with this was that login.php was required for the whole website and powered a good deal of the functionality. Most of the website was created with login.php providing the authentication. So you can imagine I just did something to the website that causes this issue to occur. Apparently not because 3 hours later for me and another hour or two with my dad solved no bug…

My website was dead… the cause? SPAGHETTI CODE.

Login.php was a horrible piece of code. I couldn’t figure it out my self either I just knew it worked and that if I kept using the session variables and cookies it set that I could get what I needed and provide the features I wanted. However it was over… the website had died.

Thats when I created my temporary flash website of Chris Portela V7.net so I could create Chris Portela V7.net

I didn’t expect this website to get any more popular but apparently I’m putting together content that people want to read.

Those are the monthly statistics since I’ve started my website. I have not advertised at all and do not provide any services on my website. I think that it’s been going up pretty quickly or at least hasn’t been going down. It reached 532 visitors in May and 443 in June. July is already at 398 and probably going to get close to 500. Now I just need to figure out why my ads aren’t bringing in any money… :\

Currently both ChrisPortela.com and Chris-Portela.com work for both sending me emails and accessing my website. I’ve been wanting to make the switch for a while especially since my Chris-Portela.com domain is a bit harder sell to people. The dash is hard to explain and usually embarrassing.

While I haven’t finished changing all the links to chris-portela.com or anything I know I need to at least change ones on my website. I will be doing this soon.

I hope this new wordpress website will be all I need for my website to function I think its going to be enough finally. After years of making my own website and dealing with the issues of developing it my self entirely I’m DONE. I almost had built my own CMS, Project management, etc website but it was just TOO much for what time I had and I need this website to work. It doesn’t look good if a web developer can’t get his OWN website to work right? Well now I do and I think it looks cool, works well, and be perfect for what I need in the future.

Chris Portela.com