Setting up my new Website with Joomla!

So I decided to build jonny-ash.com as a combination professional/personal resource. For employers, my site needs the following:

• Contact information that is protected from spam-bots
  
• Resume
• Some "about me" information
• References to this blog, which though unprofessional, does demonstrate my dedication to computer science.

For friends and family, I wanted:

• Links to all my identities on different web resources (YouTube, MySpace, Flickr)
• Aggregation (as much as possible) of those identities

This essentially really just boils down to a few use cases. I seriously considered doing it with PHP and calling it a day, but I decided to be adventurous and try getting out of the "coder" mindset and instead using an existing content management system - after all, this "Web 2.0" noise is essentially about using existing software over the web, rather than doing everything yourself. Since Joomla! has a canned installation system on DreamHost (my web host), it seemed like the clear choice.

Now that all is said and done, I'm actually fairly happy with Joomla! as a tool. It's a MySQL-backed system that does a good job of differentiating between style presentation, content, and navigation. You have a user-friendly backend which allows addition of content and drop-in style template changes (totally configurable, if you really care) and all the actual pages are generated with PHP. It's virtually seamless.

Of course, CSS allows us to separate style information from content in HTML, and this is generally good practice that is observed all over. But allowing navigation to remain distinct from content is something really handy, and it's great to be achieve it without using hack solutions (IMHO) like DreamWeaver.

It integrates neatly with Flickr and LiveJournal using Feed Gator as an extension. Blogger actually comes out pretty ugly because there's no "title" heading for Blogger entries, which makes everything pretty unreadable. There are tons of other components and modules that are freely available, as well, and some pretty slick templates.

So though it was overkill, and setup probably took twice what the PHP coding would have taken me, and although Joomla! is occasionally so complex that it gives me headaches, I'm pleased with my decision. Why? Well, mostly because now it takes .5 seconds to install a new theme and completely revamp my website's look. Having spent a summer to accomplish just that much for a college department in the old days, that's pretty danged satisfying.

jonny-ash.com

Introducing jonny-ash.com.

I've finally invested in some real web hosting via DreamHost.