It is finally time! It's definitely been a while, but I felt it was time to get off my lazy ass and do a serious make over on my site. I did run into a few challenges along the way, the biggest was porting my existing posts from Blogger.com and into my own home-grown CMS that you see today.

After doing some searching around for ways to backup a Blogger.com site, I ended up going with the recommended way I found in the Blogger.com help site. By changing my template and exporting the posts as a new file. I chose my own format for the file though, using a generic XML format. In about an hour I had an XML parser that would add each of the entries into my new schema.

One of the other challenges was actually working with a new framework, or one that was at least new to me. I ended up rolling with Code Igniter, as I found it extremely flexible and lightweight. There are still a few things however that I'd like to add to this site, but for now I feel like it is at least beta quality. Since my site is relatively small isn't a heavily hit site, I felt beta quality was good enough to release.

 Over the next few months, I plan to finish up the things left out when I have some time. One thing is an archive. Although, I'm not sure exactly how necessarily this is with the search functionality. Previously, I didn't have search available, so we'll see how it goes for now. I might add the archive stuff back in.

I have also slimmed down the flickr integration and also improved the caching. This will mean that load times will drastically improve. In the future I will be adding my photo sets back into the mix, but for now it's just my photo stream straight up.

I've also decided to add captcha throughout my site. This specifically effects two areas, comments and the contact form. I didn't get that many spam posts on my previous site, but I'm hoping this will reduce that number even more.

If you have any feedback on the site so far, please let me know!