Long absence
I feel the need to let inquiring minds know why I was so absent from the web world over the summer. I did come up with some new ideas for my website, and I’ve started work on implementing them. Some are nearly finished, while others are just getting off the ground. Sadly, they’ll all have to wait a little while for my system-clock issue to get resolved. I have 2-3 months of code work saved on my Linux partition (yeah, I shoulda backed it up, I know) which is currently inaccessible. Since I know I can still get back to it, I’m a little hesitant to recreate all the work I’ve already done.
First off are the primary changes to the site, which I’ve already started putting together. The new CSS layout lends itself to a quick and easy templating system that I’m dying to try out. I may get to the point where nearly all of my pages are simply stored in a database, and I run a quick and simple program to dynamically generate everything. I’m still unsure as to whether I want to move to total dynamic generation, such that I no longer have any static pages. I may stick to static a while longer, and use the program to generate and update the static pages as necessary. It should save a little effort in the server processing load, while keeping pretty much the same general feel.
The ultimate goal in all this is to divest the amount of work necessary to make radical changes to the site. I’ll admit that I’m not much of a radical changer, and the changes over the past 3 years have been minimal and cosmetic at most, but having the experience of designing an ultimately flexible and dynamic site will serve me well when/if I get into the webpage design business.
One of the really cool scripts I’ve written does a complete dynamic generation of the navigation systems for my site. I can simply store a morphic tree-based structure in a database, and I should be able to move branches of the tree to different areas simply by changing one or two numbers. The best part is that I can dispense with handwriting the navbars at the top of the page, and I can cut the dozens of different menu scripts I’m currently using. Likewise, adding a new leaf won’t require changes to dozens of pages, just a simple addition to the database. The biggest question with this system is how I’ll handle the URL writing, so I’ve started digging into the Apache URL rewriting system.
Sometimes I think about taking an easier road and just settling on some sort of content management system, especially since I know that other programmers have gone this very same route before and have already found a solution. In a way, it kinda harkens back to the good ol’ days of high school, when my math teachers were always begging me to show my work. They wanted assurance that I solved the problem myself. They never seemed to accept that, for me at least, the process of finding the solution far outweighs the benefits of simply having the answer.