I have been working on my personal website for quite sometime now. Unfortunately, its nowhere near completion yet. Occasional spurts of time-dedication did help, eventhough the completion of the site is taking longer. Its starting to bother me and I will not be surprised myself, if I put my not-so-fully-complete site live soon. Different thoughts start rushing in as soon as the go-live of the site comes up in my mind.
It all began with the thought of getting a domain name for myself. Not being a much creative person, I had my “inspiration-factor” to help me. Soon I had my domain, www.neoalchemist.com. The domain name was purely inspired by the term itself – neoalchemist – which was coined by my friend praveen, who shares my real name itself.
After the domian name, I had to write some code so that it can be redirected to my livejournal account. It took no time to write a javascript, which adorns the neoalchemist site now, which redirects the visitors to my live journal account. Design of the website was a major issue. Help was at hand in the form of my sweet wife, radhu who sat with me patiently as I was going on with the list of things which I needed on my site. The first thing I wanted was my journal to be linked to the website. I didnt have a livejournal paid account, so that I could link my journal direclty published at my website. I opened a blogger account, and it did indeed help me publishing my journal immediately.
The html code did take some time, as when you really get involved you dont realize how much time you spend on it. Unknowingly I was putting in a lot of time in coding, not just putting up raw html codes, but deleting, changing, linking, a lot of time was spent behind it to get a prototype of the design. Many factors came into consideration. Finally on suggestion of msram that I should be using no <table> tag, but should be using CSS fully, I started using full CSS for the website. I did realize that this caused a problem with Netscape 4.x browser., but then decided that initially I will keep the design for the IE, ignoring the Nutscape Netscape browser.
Integration of the site with my Blogger account was already happening. But part of me was still fully supporting account. Finally it was the which won, and soon I upgraded my LJ account to paid account. Now I had to work again with integration of my live journal account with the website. Understanding the style code was really a uphill task, and finally I managed, again thanks to my sweet wife, who logged in with her early adopter account. Once I was in her account, I could see for myself, how the Style codes worked. It didnt take much time after that to create a basic style code for myself, with barely any style attached to it. I needed just the entries in my journal to come through to my site.
Once that was accomplished, Next was to code the appropriate links for the previous and latest entries. A bit of brain-racking with javascripting and the url syntax made it possible for me to devise a way to link my livejournal previous entires. Still a lot is remaining to be done on the livejournal side, so that the redirection and the day view also corresponds to the style which I have created for my site. Another feature to be added is the Search facility, which can search the content of the my livejournal and present it in proper day view.
Though a lot of work remains to be done, it will be better to get my site online soon, which I think will encourage me to update it more frequently. All your /bouquets/brickbats are welcome and feel free to respond to me at praveen@livejournal.com. All your suggestions and criticism will help me learn the user-friendly-factor of my site.
