So here I am starting my first foray into the world of blogging.

I’ve never been much into blogging, even though I have to my credit: a livejournal page, a shared facebook account, a mixi account, a blogger account, and whatever microsoft was using for their blog system 2 years ago.

Suffice it to say none of these have ever been really updated with anything resembling regularity.

But I’m hoping that this blog will be a bit different. I’ve been inspired (or beaten around the head, whichever way you want to look at it) by my friend who runs BingoCardcreator.com and is also the owner of the increasingly popular small business blog MicroISV on a Shoestring which in fact was so popular that he even got interviewed for a book called Blog Blazers (Which I have a copy of, but still have never read).

In any case, he started out with the dream of making bingo cards for English Teachers in Japan, and got sucked in to the wonderful world of website optimizations and internet marketing. He’s surprisingly done very well for himself almost to the point that he makes about as much as I do at my day job by selling bingocards to school teachers.  Part of me is always glad that he chose to focus his diabolic marketing energy into something like bingocards instead of say, world domination, otherwise we’d all by singing hail to the Patrick.

So, back to the main point, I took his idea and decided to try my hand at some marketing / site-design and try to learn some new systems that I never knew before. The experience has completely changed the way that I view programming and design. Bingocard Creator is run off of RubyOnRails, the newest-and-greatest technology to ever hit the web (apparently), but as I am a dyed-in-the-wool PHP programmer I decided to try and find some sort of framework that could match the “it just works” methodology of RubyOnRails while not leaving my comfortable niche of PHP.

After checking out a lot of frameworks, I finally settled on CakePHP which is a framework for PHP based on RubyOnRails. It took a lot of getting used to, but a few months later, I feel that I am fully confident to actually use CakePHP for projects in the future, and hopefully erase some of the evil code that plagues my main site ( Ippatsu @ JapaneseTesting.com ) in future upgrades.

So, after a long and windy introduction, I lay out the purpose of this blog:

To share with anyone else who is thinking of making their own CMS-based site, the trials, tribulations and resources that helped me to get my site up and running.

Essentially I’ll be sharing programming tricks that I’ve found, marketing ideas, design resources, etc. Pretty much anything that I think that’s useful to people trying to make their own site.

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