Anaconda

I spent the autumn of 2005 as an exchange student at KAIST in South Korea. To keep friends and family updated I wanted to blog about my experience, and since I like programming, I naturally like the idea of building my own blog engine.

Due to limitations in the hosting environment I had to use a scripting language and store the blog entries as files. So, I ended up writing it in PHP and used XML files for the storage.

The blog ended up being one XML file where I wrote all my blog entries. Then, with PHP I generated the start page with the latest blog post, archive pages with all entries for a specific month. The user could also choose a language, since I wrote some of the blog posts in two languages (Swedish and English). So on each page load the PHP script loaded the XML file with all the entries and then generated the HTML for whatever page that was requested. It worked quite well for a while, but by the end of my stay the XML file had a little too many entries so it started to take some time to generate each page.

Unfortunately (for me) I’ve lost both the blog engine and my posts from the period. Maybe not the most exciting project, but I really enjoyed writing and using it.