17-Jan-2015
Started building this website
Today I have started to build this website.
I have drawn a rough sketch and started taking it's photos in dim Netherlands light, on the dining table of my house and in my office room. Finished editing all the photos for the buttons and designed a very basic frontpage using HTML in VS editor, with a couple of free icons downloaded from the internet. I think I will keep the webpage like this, kind of liked it's simplicity, and will not touch it further. Still need to think a color for the background area, which for sure will not be white or gray...
The main purpose of the website will be sharing my photos and blog posts out of popular social media sites; instead in a place that I own myself and can modify myself. There has been enough bad experiences with social media and free internet services that made me come into that decision. There will be two sections, a blog section and photo gallery section. I am not planning to build a professional portfolio page, I am not a pro photographer, I will share just usual stuff I would share in any social media page, like travel photo albums and any other interesting work that worth sharing with others. The blog will be a collection of my blog posts in 3 other websites, about travel, photography and computer programming, but in future I plan to create another blog page for the programming ones.
I do not expect much traffic on it, or to become an internet fenomen with this website. But of course, if nobody is following it, there is no purpose in maintaining it... From now on, I plan to stop sharing my original photos directly in my social media pages but I will instead share links to my webpage, and keep the original content here. There are many reasons to do that, starting from the intellectual property rights they directly disrespect, the photo compression they apply to uploaded user photos that destroys the quality drastically, and of course to stop providing valuable content to those websites that earn billons without producing anything themselves other than the content provided by you.. For now, I have no plan for monetizing my website with Ads etc. but I would be happy if I can somehow make it earn its own hosting.. There will be absolutely no "Like" buttons or comparable in the website, only a simple view counter, like good old days..
I decided to program this website on raw HTML5, CSS, Javascript, ASP.NET Razor and MySql, using also some open source libraries and resources. So it will be a good exercise for me on web programming, which I do not follow quite a while now.. When it has finished, I am planning to share some parts of that website in my GitHub profile, free to use by everyone.
Let's see how things will come up.