reflection [Article] Building a new beginning

[Jimi Wikman]

Building this new site feels amazing, yet very confined at times. Simple things that I have been used to are simply not part of the infrastructure. Other things are just different and things I wished I had a long time ago. Overall this is just the beginning of building a new beginning for my website.

As with my old site I am still a bit all over the place when it comes to what I want the site to be about. I have already started to add my project portfolio and of course this blog, but beyond that I still play around with different things. Downloads are always nice and I have some thoughts on what I would like to do with that. The Gallery is just a dumping ground for images at the moment, pretty much like Facebook used to be. We'll see how much effort I want to put there later, but for now it will just be the way it is.

The forum is a hub for conversation. I have added the "Ask Jimi" function I have been pondering on for a while. I also add sections for community discussions even if I don't know if that will ever pick up. Clubs are there of course as mini-communities. I have them mostly for the Atlassian Usergroup that I am leader for, but we'll see what else we can use it for. Calendar can be used for events, but I am not going to put that much effort into it right now. In the future it can be extended to different types of events to make it more useful.

I do have the commerce part added to this site as well. It can be used for a great deal of things like donations or actually selling physical and digital things. As my book comes along, maybe I'll add it here and maybe it can be used to sell things like art or designs in the future? We'll see what can be done and I have some ideas that are connected to the downloads section. I tossed in a videos section because I love the simplicity and the fact that I can keep track of my own best videos in an easy way.

Pages are the big part of this new site. It's a powerful application that you can use to build pretty much anything you want. The problem is that documentation is very poor and the community is not really active or helpful always. Despite this I find it very satisfying to try to figure out how to get the data I need to build the things I want. This blog is built on Pages, even though I have the blog functionality as an application as well. The reason is that I like the function to add a blog function to the clubs, but I find it lacking for my own blog.

I also use it to build the database for project portfolio. Later I will build some new databases as well such as a code snippets database and a profiles database where I present and promote different people. For now I focus on the basics, but later on I will start looking at database relationship functionality to bring data from other databases into records. This is useful for example to bring in profiles into a project database or reviews into a blogpost.

Over all I need to think about what I want to see here and why. Until I figure that out I will just continue having a good time posting blogposts, uploading videos and making status updates. It's such a nice feeling to have so many functions to play around with!

...but first I will go for a walk in the scorching summer heat and clear my head

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