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.

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

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

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. 

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.