New and improved website
17-01-2010 23:51
I've been working for several days on changes to the website. Obviously there are visual changes, but the bigger changes have been under the hood.
I'v abandoned PHP in favor of static html pages. I wasn't using most of the real features of PHP. THe extent of my dynamic pages was to assemble included portions of pages on the server. I'll explain more in a minute, but I do the same thing now with static pages, I just assemble the pieces at my house and upload the static resulting pages. The other reason for doing so was I started having lots of problems with my custom functions in PHP. My pages were working on my home computer development environment, but once uploaded to the webserver I was having problems. This new way is simpler and if there is a problem I will know right away and can fix it easier. This also allows me to create a static snapshot of my site that can be saved on a CD or such for historical interest. Such content would be in a usable form for as long as web browsers can read html files.
As for the architecture, I am using txt2tags for my raw pages and it takes care of generating the html. It has a simplistic feature set, and there are some limitations, but they can be worked around for the most part. It allows nested file inclusions, it floats pictures to the left or right, and it allows easier to read articles.
To assemble everything I've created a custom Makefile. I defined all of the rules by which I would turn my text files into html pages and the commands required by txt2tags and other utilities. Make takes care of all of the dependencies and the build order. If I cange any pages, only those pages that have changes are regenerated. I will continue to refine it, but I like it so far.
The blog section is requiring the most work. Basically I am rewriting all of the dynamic PHP that used to assemble blogs into scripts that create static page equivalents. It just takes some time, that is all.
More to come.
