After running a blog on my girv dot net website for around a year, I found that I was writing articles covering three main topics: technical, cycling and “everything else”. Taking stock, I felt that the three information strands didn’t belong under one roof, so I’ve recently implemented a reorganisation and split the original blog out into two standalone sites under their own domains. I now maintain four “personal” sites covering different topics.
johngirvin.com, as you undoubtedly are aware since you’re reading it now, holds information on my career, skills and experience to date, showcases some of the real life web projects that I’ve worked on and has my CV ready for download.
My original site, girv dot net, has existed in various guises and domains since October 1996. Today it covers “retro” computing and gaming, with sections dedicated to the Amiga, Amstrad CPC and Vic-20 systems, with games, cheats, utilities and more to play online and download as well as a browser version of Daleks to enjoy. It also acts as a repository for my work on the Amiga WHDLoad community project.
http://www.girv.net
The first of my recently launched sites, Rain Miles Count Double, is a blog about owning, maintaining, commuting and having fun on bikes in Belfast and Northern Ireland generally. I’m a keen amateur cyclist when I’m not at the computer keyboard and Rain Miles is intended as a kind of diary of my cycling life in the present day. There are articles on maintenance, commuting, the cycling lifestyle, fitness for cycling, occasional rants and opinion pieces and more.
http://www.rainmiles.com
Finally there is Wee Doors Banging, a blog to collect random miscellanery that I’d otherwise lose track of. The name comes from something my dad used to say to me: “John, your head’s full of wee doors … and they’re all banging“. I hope it imparts the sense of randomness that I intended.
http://www.weedoorsbanging.com/
girv dot net and johngirvin.com run as PHP5 application based on the CodeIgniter framework, with this site having a Wordpress powered blog integrated with the rest of the application. Rain Miles Count Double and Wee Doors Banging are pure Wordpress powered blogs with slightly customised themes. All sites run on a Debian Linux VPS using MySQL for data storage as required.
All the Wordpress sites have the wp-content folder moved to a new location, enabling me to easily manage the separate Wordpress installations with Subversion. The custom additions to each installation are held in the content folder under source control with the other files in the project, whereas the Wordpress installation itself is held as an external reference to a vendor repository that I maintain separately. Similarly, the plugins for each Wordpress installation are also held as external references to a different vendor repository. Together, this means that I can have each site under it’s own source control project, but still quickly and easily update them all to new versions of Wordpress or plugins using a few simple commands.
Moving the content from the original girv dot net blog was easily achieved by using the built in export functions of Wordpress. The resulting file was imported into the new blogs and the unneeded articles and media items for each were deleted. The Apache web server was then configured to redirect visitors to the old articles to the correct respective new URL, giving a seamless transition.
I’m pleased with how the implementation of these new sites went and with how they have allowed me to organise my content. If any of the subject matter mentioned above sounds interesting, I’d invite you to browse around the various sites and tell me what you think. See you there!
John Girvin is an experienced a software engineer and web developer based in Belfast, Northern Ireland. He draws on over 14 years of hard won, real world experience of different projects, clients and working environments.
John is currently working with the Art Technology Group (ATG), developing J2EE based, market leading e-commerce technology.
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