Duskrider's Blog

Well, I'm going to call it ready to go live. www.forestoflove.com, the Forest of Love, is now open to the public. This is a project that I've been working feverishly on for the last couple of months, and it's an idea I've had since the middle of last year. At that time I was involved with someone that I cared very deeply for, and even though it didn't work out, this idea never would've become a reality without that person. If she ever reads this post, then I would like to say, in all sincerity, thank you for arousing in me the feelings that made a site like the Forest of Love possible.

In any case, the project presented a number of technical challenges in general, and for me personally. It's the first real chance I've had to work with sessions, a user account system, and a real built-from-scratch relational database. The idea is pretty simple. A user can create an account, for free, and then create a 'virtual tree carving' for someone they love. That carving is then given its own page on the site under the premise of planting a tree in the Forest of Love. The user also has the option of announcing the event to friends, family, and their loved one in several different ways... e-mail, graphical website links, and even a sort of certificate, called a portrait, that creates a printable page with a picture of the tree and carving on it.

All of the things I've talked about in this blog for the last month or so has been culminating on that site... the bot blocker, sitemap generator, and captcha script are all used there, though they were tested here first. The whole idea, for me anyway, was to use all I had learned up to this point to create something that was totally custom and unique. There are perhaps three scripts running on that entire site that weren't hand coded by myself from scratch, so it gives me a real sense of accomplishment to see the site up and running. It also gives me a real life example, both to myself and others, of what I can do as a webmaster, programmer, and graphic design artist. The only thing left to do is promote it, which isn't as big of a deal on today's internet as it was just a few years ago. Once I'm picked up by Google, which has already happend actually, then the page will filter throughout the 'net pretty fast... though I'll still submit the site manually to places like dmoz, free stuff sites, and other smaller directories.

The background used for the main page logo is a modified version of a background I made before I started work on the site, specifically for use there. Pretty soon I'll put that image up on my gallery here for everyone to use and enjoy. Feels good to be putting an image up on my site again. :)

-Ed