Bengfort.com

Just an update for those of you still reading, the Bengfort.com Dell Server has shipped after some delays and contract negotitions with AtlanticASP (or possibly the Canton Group, I don’t know which). Needless to say, I have signed a 2 year contract for around $2k per year for a dedicated server on an education related plan. This means that I am going to be spending July and August working on revamping the site and making changes.

Probably in the next week or so the Server (which is going to be a Gentoo Linux LAMP) will be installed and I will be given SSH access to the server, then the interesting work will begin. For the time being, I am going to have development happen on a development server, while keeping the site as it is up. I will then slowly insert the new parts of the site into the exisiting site, so there may be some design incongruities, etc.

As for the plan for my development, it is as follows:

Phase 1: Revamp blogs, create blog engine, migrate existing blogs to blog engine. Initial redesign of individual blogs.

Phase 2: Revamp homepage, and smaller accessories to the site (meet the family, etc.)

Phase 3: Revamp the albums page, allow a more facebook like use of album uploading and downloading, etc.

Phase 4: Revamp the cookbook pages, allow for better sharing of recipes, etc.

Phase 5: Design integration- tie the site together visually.

Phase 6: Add-ons, including twitter and other applications, security review.

So you can expect this all to happen in the next couple of months. Hopefully with school starting in the fall, I can manage to put this all together.

One other hold up is the fact that my laptop that I ordered from Dell won’t arrive until after I have already left for Washington. Considering I need it for consulting in NY, etc. I think this could be a big hold up. Hopefully we can resolve that situation with some quick shipping, etc.

Ben

For those of you that are interested, we are moving to the next phase of bengfort.com web development- getting off the shared server we are hosted on now, that is pretty limited, and is really only just a file server- and moving to our own (hopefully dedicated) virtual server. This means a lot of things, and I am excited about all of them!

1. With PHP and MySQL, we can employ a database driven dynamic website, as well as my own custom blog application to release us finally from Blogger, and me having to store so many HTML pages on the site. I tried to use a page count tool for the site, and it stopped after 500 pages- way to many in my opinion! With PHP, the site dynamically loads the information you want from a database, so I don’t have a page for every single post!
2. I can apply HTTP authentication for secure areas of the site. This way, we can have a part of the site for Bengforts only, secure other information that we don’t want getting around, as well as placing a front end up for our FTP server, so that we can share files more easily. The secure portion will also mean sign in, which will give us individual user functionality.
3. @bengfort.com email addresses! Don’t worry, we can still tie these into our gmail accounts.
4. Picture Album functionality, for Facebook-like sharing of our photo albums.
5. The recipe site will finally start working!

Pretty much anything we want to do with the site will be possible once I gain more control of the site. If you have any ideas let me know, and I would be happy to see if we can implement them.

I have gotten some questions about my time and involvement with the project, and I just want to reassure you- now that I am doing graduate work in Computer Science, I think it would be embarrassing not to have this site upgraded well! Also, I need to get my own blog started, rather than just this bengfort.com blog!

Well, it has been a while since I have put posts onto this blog- I’m sorry about that. Things for bengfort.com except standard maintenance and adding photo albumns have sort of fallen by the wayside- mostly because of my new job at the Oxford University Press.

But aside from that, I have been learning new technologies that will help me broaden the website and give greater flexibility while adding web applications to the site. Since I am new to the world of web application development, you must bear with me as I do a lot of reading- a lot of reading- and not much implementation. Plus the current state of the website (see below) has not allowed me the flexibility that I need. Right now I have fallen into the Microsoft trap- I am developing using Windows Server 2000, ASP.NET, C#, SQL Server, and Visual Studio 2005. I was going to teach myself other technologies like MySQL, PHP, Apache, and XML, but only XML got picked up. The main reason for this is because of the Microsoft development I do at work- but also because as a would-be professional, I want to get developer certifiactions, and this is one way to learn them.

Needless to say, you won’t see very many changes to the website in the near future- at least not having to do with any of the technologies I mention above. Hopefully you will see continued use with the blog space, and recipe and album pages updates as we put them up. But for now, the basic plan will not change- with just one exception.

I am planning on changing the homepage of bengfort.com into a single page that will serve as a graphic for your homepages- see http://www.google.com, http://www.cengen.com, http://www.wikipedia.org for examples of pages that have a single graphic entry portal. These pages are single graphic with no news text, but possibly announcements and graphics changes. They include links to navigate into the website, as well as a Google searchbar to facilitate searches into the rest of the web. I want every time you load your webpage to have this page be your entry into the internet.

State of the Website

This is the state of the website as it stands on August 14, 2007. Right now the website is basic HTML pages (sometimes with the extension .htm) that are posted to Atlantic ASP’s server via ftp. I believe that the website has 5 GB of space allotted to it, I have no idea how much space is actually being taken up- but my backup of the website is 80.7 MB, so we aren’t using nearly as much space as we have- but 5 GB will run out quick! The problem with this provider is that I don’t have access to the server that bengfort.com resides on. This means that I cannot run scripts on the pages or run applications like Apache or MySQL on the server because I cannot config them- and therefore basic web applications that you take for granted on other sites cannot happen on bengfort.com (things like feedback surveys, and dynamic HTML).

We use third party providers to do most of that active/dynamic work on the website. For instance, we use Google’s blogger to provide our blogging functions. To write blogs, we navigate away from bengfort.com and sign in and use blogger’s applications to write and design the blog. Then when we hit publish post- blogger sends the blog as HTML via FTP to bengfort.com. We use Clocklink to host our clocks on the main page. Metric Conversions hosts the converter pages. Access Counter keeps track of all the site statistics on the main page. iWebAlbum creates the photo slideshows. And finally, Google provides the search boxes.

Unfortunately this provides limited functionality as well as poor performance on the website becasue many different outside sites have to work on the page, which causes higher traffic on your internet connections, and slows FTP work down back and forth.

Update Plans

Therefore, not out of vanity, but rather as a learning experience- the plan for bengfort.com is to switch internet providers (probably to a provider that costs money to maintain) that way I can have access to the server and actually host the applications that are on the website. I don’t plan on setting up my own server to connect to, because we are moving so much, this would be a waste of our broadband, and wouldn’t provide reliable service to the website.

The first step will be the single graphic homepage, I am going to need your ideas for the design of this! Let me know what you think.

Next will be the website migration- which might change the design of the site completely. During this process there will be a temporary loss of service to bengfort.com.

Next, the recipe application will be designed and put up- and the blog probably switched over to wordpress or some other software. Finally, all other applications will be run on the website.

This basic plan probably spans a couple years- so don’t hold your breath for these changes to happen soon! Hopefully we can grow this website together as we do more blogging, etc.

I have become a nerd- thank God!

Today I have officially (according to my wife and my sudden urge to watch re-runs of TNG) become a nerd, and not a moment too soon! (The picture below should explain all, note the CenGen shirt…)

Today I turned my Naval Academy computer that is five years old, suffering from all the various components (and video games) I have installed on it, into a local web server with Apache 2.0, php 5.1, and MySQL so I can have a testing environment to build the Bengfort Blog Engine.

Frankly, I am not sure it will survive the installation.

So far, I have desperately run to Staples to get an external USB hard drive to back up my computer in the face of ever impending blue screen doom. (Somehow, magically the computer came back to life… I don’t know what happened, but to this day the Computer sometimes will not turn off without physically unplugging it from the wall!) I can’t run multiple applications of anything more complicated than iTunes or Internet Explorer. And every time I turn the computer off, I do so terrified that it won’t turn on again (especially since my computer basically rejected the external hard drive!)

Well that is that, and even though my poor 90 GB Hard Drive is almost maxed out (remember when: “90 Giga-whats? Gosh, I won’t even use 90 of those mega-thingys, why do they give us so much space?”) I have still boldly gone into programming territory.

Today I have moved from simple web designer to web programmer.

With my successful installation, I hope to achieve what so few jocks have done in the past- to actually do something useful with a computer. And if my computer survives, I intend to design and install our very own blog engine onto the website. Step one complete: one small step for 10 year olds, one giant step for ex-Navy Lacrosse players everywhere.

And as promised in the past few blogs… it begins! Now the only question remains: does my domain have php, etc. installed on the server in Baltimore?

The comment on the last post is a good one and the question: “Why not just use a pre-packaged solution like WordPress?” is the central question for the next phase of www.bengfort.com evolution.

Before I start: I just want to say that I am about to review ExpressionEngine, Movable Type, TextPattern, WordPress, and Blogger and present a comparison of those pre-packaged solutions in the next post. The question for today’s post merely compares the suitability of using my own created blog engine vs. using a pre-packaged solution*.

Currently we are using a “pre-packaged solution”- blogger. As you read this post, you are reading a post that was created by blogger using the blogger engine, database, and server- that posted an html page via ftp onto www.bengfort.com into the correct folder for whoevers blog it is. When you write a comment- you leave www.bengfort.com and go to beta.blogger.com/comments- which then publishes the new html and sends it via ftp to the website. When a Bengfort.com Blogger signs into Blogger, they leave www.bengfort.com to create and publish their posts, then come back to view it. The only thing that happens on www.bengfort.com is the viewing of the blog.

There are benefits of using this method:

1. The Blog can be searched for on Blogger.com (I think)
2. Each Blog can have its own template and style that the girls wish- and they can do it without knowing HTML, because the minor things like navigation I can do myself. All they have to do is choose their template from the 26 on blogger.
3. I don’t have to do anything with RSS, run any applications on the server, or install anything into the domain for it to work- plus we get to deal with professionals, not a developing engine that I would be working on.
4. This is quick and easy, and linked to our google accounts.

However, these benefits can be annoyances, and there are some desirable aspects of having my own PHP, MySQL, Apache engine running on the server.

1. With a little work, I can index the blog on several websites including major blog search websites to expand readership. Also we would have to maintain our readership through ohter advertising of some sort. Essentailly in time I could counter the affect of the blogger search.
2. Blogger search only works in blogger.
3. Although the girls can choose their own basic template, they can’t personalize it any further. I could design and create templates for the girls that would be much more unique than the blogger website, while still maintaining the feel of the Bengfort website. It leaves all the design in my court- but in the end it would be a much more personalized solution.
4. We wouldn’t have to leave bengfort.com in order to blog
5. Easier website navigation, etc.
6. RSS applications are not necessarily what I want running with our blog. I would prefer that people go to the website and actually read it online, but if folks did use an RSS application- I could set up the site for use with it. I would also allow RSS into facebook, and other web-based applications
7. I would have full and better control over the website- and I wouldn’t be “blocked by the chinese government…”

My intitial reaction to build my own engine was when Devi couldn’t log into Blogger from China. We originally suppossed that was because the website was blocked so I decided to build my own engine that wasn’t blocked. However, Devi is now allowed onto blogger- so there is not so much a time issue, and we can take a good hard look at the pros and cons of using a pre-packaged solution vs. my own engine.

Of course, I’m leaning towards building my own: it would get me down and dirty with code I have never learned, and allow me to take full credit for my site, which would be nice. But I think an open dialogue about what is best for the site is needed. Please leave me comments with any pros, cons, concerns, applause that you can think of.

*Because we are using Blogger currently, I will probably refer to blogger as “the pre-packaged solution”.

The girls have all managed to create their blogs! That makes me happy, and they are all so diverse, which is extremely nice. Now we need to get the readership up, which will involve facebook advertising, I’m sure!

But before I know Devi was online, and in a fit of ambition, I purchased a book called Blog Design Solutions in order to build my own blog engine. I know of course, that I am writing on blogger as I say this, but I am seriously thinking about moving www.bengfort.com to its own blog engine.

What does this mean?

It means that all blogging, publishing, etc. Would take place on www.bengfort.com without the help of an outside site like Blogger. You would log into bengfort.com, write on bengfort.com and the blog engine would be maintained by yours truly. It would be very similar to what we have set up right now, except without those pesky frames at the top of the page that blogger puts up.

What would change?

Well the style of your blog would change, it would have to be something that you and I work on together to get designed, but it could be more creative, but also has the possibility of being extremely more like the main site (good or bad, I don’t know). Also I may not have as many tools up at first like blogger does (profiles, etc.) but it would be developed to that direction.

What wouldn’t change?

All that you have written so far would stay, but perhaps not the comments, I would have to look into it. Also you would still have your own log in and ability to edit your blog as usual.

Anyway, it will take me a couple weeks to design the Engine, which will include a crash course in PHP and MySQL; so we will continue using blogger for the time being. If you have any comments, concerns, or suggestions about the switchover, let me know.