For years I've wanted to run a personal Web site but never found the time to do it. A couple of weeks ago a few Zenders and I started leasing a dedicated server which gave us each a bit more hosting flexibility. Once we got the machine up and running I decided it was finally time to actually launch my own personal Web site.
I browsed the Web for a nice design and once I found one I used the little free time I have, after the kids go to sleep, to start building the site.
I got started with Zend Framework and a combination of Zend Studio for Eclipse and vim. For now it's a very simple site but I do plan on extending it over time as time permits.
What I'm using:
- Zend Framework MVC - Matthew did a great job on this. I assure anyone who starts using it will become addicted. Especially useful are the view helpers which make it dead easy to share presentation logic across pages. In my case that included the logic for the navigation menu and the Google analytics setup.
- Zend_Gdata - Google's official PHP SDK for the Google Data APIs. This component is actively developed and maintained by the Google team and works great. I use blogger.com for my blog and didn't want to migrate it to my Web site. So thanks to the Zend_Gdata component and little effort I am exposing the most recent entries on my personal Web site.
- Zend_Cache (Zend Framework's caching API) - Caching can't get any easier than this. I use it to cache the blog posts fetched via the Google Data Web service and set a TTL.
- Twitter Badge - Gives you the ability to embed a Twitter feed on your Web site.
That's about it. Most of the Web site is pretty static. It's still a bit boring right now but I am looking forward to building on top of this. If you have any feedback and/or suggestions please let me know.
Update: Click here to get to the site...
