December 14, 2004

Roadmap to Rejuvenation

For many years now, I have had a growing concern about the disparity of content that appears on my website. The major cause of this uneasiness, I finally concluded, was that I was seeking to accomplish too much from just one site. The realization that I could not justifiable use my site for both personal and professional endeavors prompted my purchase of another domain, rohitnafday.net, in November 2003. The reorganization, however, stagnated due primarily to lack of time, motivation, and a rising level of plain old laziness.

Fast forward a year later, and I find myself in a different situation, with spare time on the horizon and a strong desire to tie up loose ends before leaving college. Thus, I present my Roadmap to Rejuvenation, which I hope will prevent the hasty and haphazard redesigns of the past and allow me to finish the project in a timely and efficient manner.

The Goal

The eventual goal of the reorganization is to separate the often times gratuitous, profane, and personal content that frequently appears in my blog and gallery from the informative and professional content I would like to put on the web. Rohit's Realm will remain my personal site, with content directed at friends and (some) family, while RohitNafday.net will become my professional site, safe to be viewed by strangers and acquaintances alike. For all of you normal people, this entry is effectively over. For all of you who consider yourselves CS dorks, read forth and if you notice something wrong with my thinking, let me know!

The Plan

I have identified a number of steps that I need to take to make this project a success, which are listed below. If I'm feeling ambitious, I might even update this entry as they are completed.

1. First order of business is to do a complete audit of all static content on rohitsrealm.com as it exists currently. Old and defunct pages need to be either discarded, or categorized, updated, and ported to rohitnafday.net.
2. The backend blog engine that currently powers Rohit's Realm has become unwieldy and unmanageable due to tight integration with the site. I need to completely redesign the engine as a general entity, independent of the display mechanism.
3. With the general blog engine complete, any remaining software that runs (on) Rohit's Realm must be audited and appropriate action taken. This may involve scrapping the code or in the case of the Dating Game Project, cleaning it up, and porting it to RohitNafday.net.
4. At this point, any remaining content desired for RohitNafday.net should be completed, and that site should be made ready to launch.
5. Rohit's Realm will need to be totally redesigned, as I'm getting quite bored of the current appearance. Once design is complete, all blog data will be migrated to the new system.
6. At some point, I need to take down the machine that hosts my websites and rebuild it. I plan to put in a RAID 1 array for data redundancy, upgrade the operating system to FreeBSD 5.3 and the database server to Postgres 8.0, fix the mod_perl installation, and finally replace the 2nd processor that burned out a couple years ago.

I'm looking to finish this all by the end of Winter Break, but we'll see what happens. One way or another, now that stuff is written down, it'll be harder to forget or simply not do.