Re-Launching With New Host And Domain - Distant Web

I'm going to try and keep this short, but anyone who knows me will already know that brevity is my kryptonite. But I'm still going to try. Unfortunately, before I get to the present - as well as what is in store for the future - I must summarize the past slightly.

I have been building websites for about 21 years now, focusing heavily on programming with PHP for about 16 years. I've never been good at design (obviously), but I do pretty well on the actual programming side. About 7 years ago, I started a project that I had hoped would help with putting together any future site; a custom Content Management System (CMS).

This CMS started as simply a user registration/login system, with support tickets and a forum/BBS. It grew and evolved over the years to include shoutbox, polls, blogs, uploads, a photo gallery and more. It served me well enough, but it was overly cumbersome in places, and with such a long period of time with long gaps of productivity, the code was uneven to say the least.

The plan had always been to get so far with the CMS, then start over with what I learned in that time. I knew that I wasn't going to get everything right in my first attempt. But as the CMS grew, the mere idea of starting over became more and more daunting. So I put it off, time and time again.

Then in January of this year (2020), I wrote a book.

Over the course of 9 months (give or take), I decided that a shift in focus was in order; at least for the time being. I do not consider myself to be a 'writer' (I'll probably go into more detail on that later), so I don't really see this as being a truly new path for myself. However, I also was already starting to rethink my path in coding.

With this new focus in mind, it seemed like the perfect opportunity to do what I had long put off; start over. And this time, I would keep it somewhat simple.

No one really uses forums anymore, so that was dropped. The same goes for the shoutbox and a few other odds and ends. I also decided to drop that photo gallery for my own reasons, though I could rewrite that in the future.

Now, one problem I always had with this CMS is its limitation in terms of sites/domains; any given installation would work on one site/domain, and one site/domain only. It was always my intention to set it up so that one database could power multiple domains if needed, but it never worked out that way. With the pending publication of my book, which is being self-published, my own need to have multiple domains running off of one database became paramount.

Therefore, I went back to the drawing board - so to speak - and came up with a design for code that would not only allow multiple domains/sites to run off of one database, but also one set of source files.

Anyway, I guess that sums up the gist for my intentions and motivations. This new CMS was kind of a necessity, simply because I did not want multiple full installations of my software. Distant Web is still necessary as that is the face of all of my web coding. But in order to move forward with my self-publishing endeavor, a new face was needed to serve as 'Publisher'; thus Distant Words (my old music project) was repurposed. I also realized a legit 'author site' would be needed as well, thus R.P. Lauer would need a domain.

I have already gone on too long in my opinion, so I'm going to just summarize the rest.

This post here represents a new page for me. This is a brand new Distant Web and a brand new Distant Words. This is also the birth of rplauer.com, my new author site. Any time I post a blog from here on out, it may get pushed out to my other domains, or remain on the single domain from where it was posted. So let me formally introduce everything:

Distant Web: a site representing my web coding endeavors.

Distant Words Publishing: an Independent Publisher helping other independent authors in the self-publishing world.

R.P. Lauer: my new Author Site, where all future blogs will appear that are not directly related to one of the above sites.

This new CMS is in its infancy. Please be patient with me while it grows and evolves. For right now, there's not much point in registering an account, as most of what made user accounts special have been stripped away. However, user accounts will be able to post comments in various spots (on blogs for example), and at some point I will work out a mailing list of some sort.

Thank you for reading, and please let me know if you have any questions or suggestions.

P.S. Expect more blogs in the future to further explore the various purposes of each domain, most likely to be posted exclusively to those domains.