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New Site Layout and Code

The stodgy old layout was really starting to get boring so I've gone for a whole new look and feel for my site. Hopefully its nicer to look at and easier to navigate. The biggest changes functionally are that visitors can now leave comments and search previous entries by tags. I've also added improved menus to the right of the entries allowing navigation by month as well as most recent posts.

There are still some things to be fixed up in the transition from the old system to the new one but overall I think everything seems to be running fairly smoothly. For this re-write I decided to get my hands dirty and learn the MVC-paradigm with a little CakePHP. The learning curve is quite steep but its certainly rewarding once you start to get going. I've managed to churn out this site in a lot less time than the last design and layout took me, as well as having much tidier and simpler code. The only thing I would criticise is Cake's brute force "load everything you might need" approach. I'm still new so I might be missing something but its pretty heavy on the old server. Caching seems to be doing a farely good job of speeding things up, however.

Not that I have any regular visitors but if you come across this entry and feel like leaving a not then give the new comment system a whirl! If you're wondering about my CAPTCHA, I figure that nobodys going to bother targeting my site specifically so adding a little simple check like a yes/no question saves me time and (hopefully) prevents most of the regular spambots targeting blogs.

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Tags: Website, Blog, CakePHP

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