My website story

This is the first Blog I am writing after inaugurating this website, long ago (2yrs back) I registered a domain belaku.net (now it is not available). First version of my Website was created using Microsoft Publisher with only static contents. But because of the browser incompatibility, unnecessary junk of formating data in final HTML pages and due to lack of dynamic content handling I dropped the idea of using Microsoft Publisher. That time I was not aware of Open source so I started searching for language for web development. I was impressed by reading one of the article of PHP(I do not have that link as of now).

So I started learning PHP, along with I was experimenting with HTML and style sheets. Some how I released the second version of belaku.net. There were some AJAX improvements and dynamic pages using PHP and MySQL. But I forgot main thing, I didnt kept an interface for adding new stuffs or updating existing stuffs. Because of this the site became static even though it is dynamic :) To add any content I had to write an script which will insert the content into MySQL database of server.

The host in which I registered was not good, one day he escaped :) he was not reachable for phone/mail. Since I didn’t had idea to continue belaku.net domain. I didn’t worry.

Later I registered a domain aravindavk.in and started developing the website with PHP. Because of work @ office I was not getting enough time to develop. Many friends suggested to use Drupal/Wordpress, but to get the complete web development experience I opted to code this website.

Finally website is released, but needs lot of improvements. The features in this website which I liked most are

Ajax based search
Option to change color theme
Hide side navigation(This helps in reading articles/blog comfortably)
Server side cache to serve the pages faster

[Update Aug 3 2009]

My website revamped, key features/changes compared to previous version are

Now it is powered by the PHP framework Chelvi. Chelvi is a Object oriented simple PHP framework.
Complete clean URL
Changing color theme will not reload the page.
Markdown is used to store the content in DB. Now I can edit/create content in Emacs (with markdown-mode) and add it in my website. Now it time to plan for Emacs plug-in to post directly to my website. [:)]
Syntax highlights using SHJS
Hide left navigation for better reading. Option will be saved in Session and cookies, so it will remain until you clear the cookies in your system. Same logic used for the color theme selection.
Improved look and feel (Still not complete)
Better error handling and logging.
Cleaner code base, as compared to previous version.

Suggest me to improve my website.

The difficult part in web development I feel is creating forms and validating. Complexity grows if we have more form elements. Please suggest if we have any good PHP library for creating and validating form elements (Similar to FormEncode in Python)

[Update Feb 19th 2011] Color themes and some links removed/changed. Sorry that a few comments lost relevance.