building kenholic.com

For me, the most difficult part of starting up a website is just figuring out where to begin. This time, I purchased a domain name, signed up for Google App Engine, and topped it off with my existing Blogger account.

Pretty simple and cool, huh? With Blogger, I don't have to worry about building out any of my own blogging tools. You could probably get by without the App Engine if you aren't familiar with programming at all, but it's what makes this site so special, and I don't have to deal with finicky apache at all.

For image hosting, I wanted to make things as simple as possible, so I started out using Picasa. But after finding out that some of the pictures didn't load up right in frames (I couldn't figure out why), I switched to App Engine image serving. The flexibility of App Engine is pretty amazing - you can even run Django (another webapp framework) on top of it, but after experimenting with and without it, I think it's overkill.

I'll post more on my site building efforts as I start adding more features, but I'd say I'm off to a good start.