I run another blog, although it’s hosted on wordpress.com rather than my domain, here.
The blog is about my boat, ‘Kudu’. It’s a 21ft Corribee - a sailing yacht - and we are planning some substantial voyages toghether. Anyway, the other evening I got an excited facebook message from a friend saying my blog was listed on the wordpress.com’s Blog Of The Day stat’s page. I had the 7th fastest growing blog on all of wordpress. I was ecstatic about it. The 7th fastest growing blog on all of wordpress!
I awoke in the morning to find I was no longer 7th, but 1st. I was shocked. I had THE fastest growing blog on all of wordpress, which means I had one of the fastest growing blogs on the entire internet at that point in time. Sadly it was short lived, I’ve since dropped off the list, but to sustain the sort of growth I was seeing was never going to happen.
I decided to rebuild my home page since it was originally done as little more than static pages. Ok, I used a bit of PHP to include headers and footers and do a couple of other litte things, but it was nothing clever.
Since it is trying to promote me as a developer, I thought I should apply a bit more effort than that. It turns out, I failed. I used Zend Framework to rebuild the site, and it just made everything even easier and less effort. From form validation to displaying my twitter feed, I had the lot built in about 4 hours, well, excluding the other 4 hours it took me trying to figure out how to get Zend Framework working with 1and1’s hosting.