Note on June 23, 2008: The post you are reading is years old, but shows the trail of the beginnings of MarcGrabanski.com. Thank you for reading!

Without much prior PHP knowledge, I managed to program this blog in less than a week. Here is how I did it. Note: This is an overview and not actual code examples.

1. First, I went through Code Grrl’s Build a Blog Tutorials

Sure, I could have stopped there but I really didn’t like how the blog was programmed. I like this tutorial though because I dug through the code and learned basic PHP, but I wanted much more functionality.

2. I wanted clean URLs so I found Making clean URLs with Apache

I customized the url so I can add keywords inside it if I want. I love these clean URLs. Apache also has documentation on mod_rewrite.

3. Then I added user authentication

This was the most basic, yet effective login script I found. Of course I modded it to make it a little more secure.

4. *I rewrote the code to use Object Oriented PHP *

My blog was basically built but I didn’t like how the code looked. I thought PHP looked horrible until I ran into some object oriented code. Makes things look much nicer.

5. Created Tag Cloud Navigation

I started with ByteMyCode’s Tag Cloud code and then moved to selecting from the database with the"LIKE"MySQL commmand.

$sql = "SELECT * FROM php_blog WHERE tags LIKE '%$tag%' ORDER BY timestamp DESC";

I also had to count the tags so I used the array_count_values PHP function.

$tags = array_count_values($DBtags); // a very useful function to count the tags!

Wow gotta love those tags!

6. Adding More Features

I added an image uploader to my admin page, RSS 2.0 and many minor tweaks until I had my *very own customized blog built from scratch!

Some functions I found very useful on php.net:

@list() split() htmlspecialchars() str_replace() explode() include(dirname(__FILE__)

I now have my own custom blog! You can too! I heavily modified each example and made them my own. It feels so nice to have a custom blog!