Introduction

At least every year i am relaunching my homepage. It all began in 2001 with my first steps in HTML followed by Flash, Javascript, PHP and so on. If you're interested in my web history use the retro link. This is a collection of some examples over the years. Maybe i will also upload the whole pages. Currently, you can only see some screenshots.

Today is the relaunch for 2007 and the technology changed again. It's the time of Web2.0 as you probably know. This means in short everybody can easily use the internet without the need of any special web skills. You can express yourself via Blogs, Community portals and lots of other popular websites.
Actually, nothing really new. For me it's more the technology and concepts that improved a lot over the time and give programmers lots of more possibilities to create innovative websites. AJAX and Ruby On Rails (RoR) are my favorite examples of this advancement. AJAX allows asynchronous processing of data and RoR is a web framework based on the programming language called Ruby. Ruby is 100 percent object oriented and RoR supports the MVC-pattern to name just a few benefits of RoR. My new site it's mainly based on RoR which supports AJAX and all other known web standards. So if you want to read more technical details about my architecture, RoR and other developer stuff, go ahead... otherwise i could recommend the gallery.

Architecture

First of all, i decided to programm my own website. I could also use other CMS-Systems or Blogs or whatever, but that is not my intention. My passion is developing not blogging. So i decided to create my own simple CMS-system based on RoR and release the whole source code under the GPL license. It's not a business project. It's just for fun and if you're interested in helping me developing a cool CMS system, please let me know. The project it's called CMOR (Content Management On Rails) and stored at the subversion (SVN) server cmor.googlecode.com. I use Eclipse with the approiate Plugins for RoR and SVN together with Capistrano to automatically deploy the new release to my production server gildhoff.com:

Unfortunately the production server uses Suse9.2 (instead of Debian) which is not very comfortable if you have to install lots of new packages. I hate to configure all the dependencies manually instead of calling just a tiny tool like "apt-get". However, you'll learn a lot if you do it manually. But thats another topic... if you have problems to install RMagick which requires GraphicsManager which requires 10 other libs ... let me know. I took me a damn long time to configure this tool on linux. Maybe i'll write a solution for this.

The CMOR project uses a simple relational schema database model (see figure 2) which is easy extendable and easy to understand. It's all about content. Users can create content and content is currently an article (like this one), a picture or a gallery of pictures. Every content is tagged by their owner and can have some comments from known users or anonymous visitors. Thats all. Pretty simple, eh?

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