Right from coding its dna (the database design) to trimming the colourful pngs, developing this baby was a great learning experience. And the power of MVC frameworks was amply demonstrated when i switched the model code from Propel to bleeding-edge Doctrine without breaking anything else.

Anyways, blogs are pretty complicated creatures as there is no end to the features you can add in them. This one is in its most simple and essential form. Its not perfect (lets see how well it scales) but it offers me complete customizability which other CMSes can't or don't.

You might ask, why would you want to have something over and above the seamless offerings of flickr, fluidr and picasa? Well, it gives me complete control of the presentation of my photos. The challenge here was not the backend but rather the IA/UI-design since the large photos take up most of the screen real-estate.

Anyhoo, this blog runs on Symfony but its the jquery, with some JSON goodness, that holds the reins of user experience. And by the way, picasa sucks; flickr's better. (The website is under development)

A client wanted to build an online portal for his offline business and provided me a poster which i transformed to a psd over the weekend. A follow-up led to its conversion to html and then i found myself providing php and javascript solutions to their coding team.

Well, the website is dud now but the experience drove the message home that PHP4 projects are just sh** to maintain.

Of the many roles one has to play in a startup company, this was my first as a web designer. And it made me realize that a css make-up job is not as easy as the language it employs. Especially if IE6 is part of the design plan.

Apart from the site redesign completed a year ago, I also created most of the graphics and other frontend jazz while working at the backend with java/jsp on the struts framework.