Alternative title: Today’s PWDB history lesson

In case you didn’t guess by the banner at the top right (or you’re in a feed reader), Peter’s Web Development Blog has been around for one year and today marks my 1-year blogging anniversary! Whoo!

So, what has happened in the last year of blogging? Well, it turns out that the style of PWDB has actually changed rather dramatically to be oriented towards tutorials, interesting hints and tips (usually about Linux, because that’s where I’m exploring) and less specifically about web development.

We’ve had two tutorial series and I’ve really got into writing tutorials. Hopefully that will continue and I certainly aim to be releasing a lot more. We’ve also seen some screen demos, with a video of Fedora Core 5’s installation procedure and a screencast of the Windows Live Mail beta.

But we’re forgetting a big portion of PWDB’s heritage here. I started the blog as a hosted Blogger blog back in October 2005. Back then the content was mainly focused for people that knew me personally and a lot of it won’t make much sense to the average person. In fact it’s only fairly recently, with the tutorial series that I would consider PWDB started pushing out some really good, universally useful content.

A major milestone after the beginning at Blogger was the move to WordPress. After having played around with the WordPress blogging platform, when Huw moved Gizbuzz from Blogger to WordPress, I knew this was going to be the future for PWDB.

After some testing with the WP platform, I decided on the WP-Andreas09 theme for my new WP install. I chose the orange to keep some consistency between the old Blogger template and the new WP layout.

This was a vital step in gaining the freedom I needed and wanted to expand PWDB and build a home website for me around it.

I’ve been interested in web design/development for four years now. In that time, I’ve been through many, many different website projects. Some didn’t get past the idea phase, most got started and never finished, and some are still here today (OK, maybe one is!). But through all that time, I never had built a ‘homepage’ for myself.

I learned pretty quickly that a website without content does not work, so that was probably the biggest factor why I didn’t. The move to WordPress gave me the opportunity to build upon the WP platform to build my site.

I soon decided, however, that I didn’t want to build the whole of my site on top of WordPress. Not that I don’t like WP, but I also really enjoy the freedom of coding myself and always have done.

The general idea of my homepage always was to aggregate all of my online presence into one site. That meant that blog integration was going to be vital. Building my own site gave birth to WPGet, my first really useful open source project and it was from this that has really driven the main site today. PWDB is no longer a disparate, detached blog. Instead my site feels (hopefully) tightly integrated with WordPress without actually running the whole site off it (I like having the full code control over my site).

The completion of the main site version 1.0 using WPGet pretty much brings us up to the current day. I’m writing tutorials, software and rants and you’ll find all of that (and more in the future) on this site.

Here’s to another year…