{"id":413,"date":"2007-07-26T02:24:15","date_gmt":"2007-07-26T02:24:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sketchbooks.com\/invis\/wordpress\/?p=413"},"modified":"2016-03-31T10:21:26","modified_gmt":"2016-03-31T14:21:26","slug":"how-i-built-my-dynamic-portfolio-website","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/invisibleman.com\/2007\/07\/how-i-built-my-dynamic-portfolio-website\/","title":{"rendered":"How I built my dynamic portfolio website"},"content":{"rendered":"

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\nFor an illustrator or designer, redesinging one’s web portfolio can be one of the most gut-wrenching projects to work on, as you are often your own worst client to work for. I have probably dozens of photoshop files of various versions of ‘new’ designs for my website that never got built. Meanwhile, my site was growing some cobwebs, and my long-overdue overhaul was dead in the water.\n<\/p>\n

\nSo last fall, I made a deal with myself: You can keep the general design of the site in tact for the time being, but for god’s sake, make the site dynamic — SOMEHOW…and do it fast!\n<\/p>\n

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\nWhat do I mean by dynamic? I mean NOT a directory with 100 odd HTML pages, totally unlinked by any kind of navigation, each with different copyright dates at the bottom, hundreds of mutations of the old crappy HTML table layout. That was exaclty what my site consisted of when I started this project.\n<\/p>\n

\nHaving used the MovableType<\/a> content management system so much (which powers this fine website), I was determined to add some sort of database to hold all of my illustration entries, and have templates for each type of page I wanted. And most importantly, a REAL navigation that would be totally automatic, that would allow you to easily navigate between all of the pages on my site, without having to keep going back to the front page again to start all over. And the gravy would be a quick web-based method of administering the conent allowing me to edit the site from anywhere. But that’s just gravy. Not necessary.\n<\/p>\n

\nI was inspired by Nate Williams<\/a> over at Illustration Mundo<\/a>, who built his whole fantastic site from scratch, after learning MySQL\/PHP. He recommended a great book, and his description of how he tackled the project made it sound very doable, so I figured I’d take a stab at it.\n<\/p>\n

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\nSo as luck would have it, while walking down the street to Gorilla coffee one day, I found a perfect copy of Larry Ullman’s excellent “PHP and MySQL For Dynamic Web Sites”<\/a> sitting on a stoop of a brownstone. This must be fate! This was the book recommended to me by Nate Williams<\/a>. I read through the basics, and decided what would be in the database.\n<\/p>\n

\nThe database would hold an individual record for each illustration with the follwing information stored in it:\n<\/p>\n