I’ve already written two posts about this web project, but now that its finished I wanted to share some of the difficulties I faced while building it.
My first hurdle for this project began with me choosing to deploy on a VPS instead of managed web hosting. I have experience in using linux as a daily-driver but Ive never tried managing a server/server-like environment, setting up NGINX, mySQL, and WordPress was quite the learning experience.
Once I got the server setup out of the way, it was time to build the actual project. Setting up the HTML was simple enough (ignoring the few bumps with ensuring it meets XHTML Strict standards), but styling the website was a prime exercise in not over-complicating things, I spent way longer than I am willing to admit just tweaking small style decisions that didn’t really matter. While all of JS needed for this project was a breeze, the PHP gave me quite a bit of trouble since I was not familiar with the language before this project.
Despite all the struggles I faced, I learned quite a lot from this experience. I’m sure this will be a great base for my future projects, including a planned rewrite of this very same website but with a more modern tech-stack.