EH-Net

So I think I finally want to buckle down and work on my site.  But I've been so out of the web development side of things I am not sure where to begin.  I would to try and build from scratch with minimal help from GUI based editors.  I will be doing most of the work from the Mac.  A friend of mine suggested emacs as the editor of choice, but he is a ruby nut so I am looking for other suggestions for editors.

Also I am looking to accomplish 2 major objectives...

1) main blog page
2) Photo Gallery

These are to start, not sure what else I may.  Does anyone have any decent references on where to start?  Looked around on the intarwebs but didn't have exactly what I was looking for.  The hosting platform is linux with MySQL databases (so I suppose LAMP).

Thanks for any assistance, also the i am hoping to get my coding skills up to speed by doing this.  I like to learn by having some sort of tangible goal.

RoR !!!

http://rubyonrails.org/

you rubyists are everywhere, well I suppose it will give me a reason to go to my friend's ruby group on a more frequent basis :D

http://www.amazon.com/PHP-MySQL-Web-Development-Edition/dp/0672329166/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1346295093&sr=8-1&keywords=php+mysql+web+development is probably the best single resource I've seen to get up to speed on web development.

I'd just go with WordPress if I were you. You can still get plenty of coding challenges if you create your own theme and customize it how you want.

Yeh most people go for wordpress as it easy and quick to get profesionall site up and running.

I ran my own server and ran wordpress for years, and I highly recommend both if you are planning on having a site that if going to get traffic or you are interested in learning.

For me though, I finally got sick of the all the admin time on keeping everything up to date on the server for a personal site that get next to no traffic and moved to google sites...

Yeah, I know what people are going to say, but I don't have to keep doing sys/web admin stuff when I come home now.

Thanks everyone!  I appreciate the input.  Yeah DataDwarf, I hear ya.  Right now it is just to get me back in the coding saddle and give me something to mess around with.  I am sure at some point I will be bored with maintaining it, but for now I want to learn a bit more about locking a site down to better understand Web App Security principles.  Sometimes it is more meaningful to actually do it than tell people how to do it.  :D

And when you inevitably introduce vulnerabilities, you may get to practice incident response. Win-win ;D

Already do in a not so hands on capacity, well not introduce the vulnerability, but handle the incident response. Unfortunately I am not the one who gets to make any changes, simply coordinate (oh how I love outsourced environments :p

At least I will be able to get my hands around my own stuff.