A long time ago I announced that I was going to re-do this whole website. In the past I would re-do my site once a year because I had learned more tricks and wanted to put them to use. This one stuck around so long because it did everything I wanted until recently.

I read a book on web standards and have a thick CSS reference book. I've got the new site all planned out and a while back I did finish the look & feel of it. Anyone who's seen it says it looks very clean and professional. Now it needs the back end.

The back end is the reason I haven't finished it yet. I want to do it using a language I don't know too well and EVERY step of the way I have to thoroughly learn something else.. and before I can learn that I have to learn something else! I've made a list of 11 things I need to be good at: Java, Java Servlets, JSF, JSP, jdbc, SQL, jaxp, XML, XHTML, CSS, JavaScript, DOM. That's just the "high level".. Try getting apache and tomcat talking together with mod_jk. HAHAHAH.. I've read every webpage on the planet about these and followed them to the T.. Recompiled apache, mod_jk, did everything everyone said and it won't work.

Basically I felt a bit discouraged because anywhere I chose as a starting point, I had to learn 3 other things before I could even do that. Yes I am overcomplicating by using fancy things like JSF the framework but this rewrite will be practice for big web based enterprise systems at work in the future. I want to do it right.

If I didn't have a job and had my summers off like I did when I was a teenager I would be a pro at this now. I'm not super motivated to read books and learn new programming languages after a full days work programming at IJW. Plus I need to relax, and have other projects around the house. The way I see it though is that if I don't master this, I'm not guaranteeing myself a programming career in the future.