About this site

Introduction

Roundabout December of 2000, I decided that it would be beneficial to have a personal homepage. The purpose being to have a ``presence on the web", a place to put useful stuff both for myself and others. The site, however, had all the problems of all my early sites - i.e. it was nearly impossible to add bits to it without having to change menus on loads and loads of pages.

Technologies

Having examined various alternatives (for a long time my preferred option was just to use SSI for the menus), I came across WebMake, which allowed me to manage my content as I liked, while making it exceedingly easy to add new sections and pages. Using some "exceedingly crafty duct-tape Perl'', it finds any new parts each day and recreates the site. Even though most of the site consists of static pages, making it easier on the server and quicker for the visitor, I have all the advantages of a dynamic site whose information is taken from a central depository and output in a template, meaning that a single change can be replicated site-wide.

I also made use of Perl. This was partly in the WebMake directives and some as standalone scripts where I felt there was a need for dynamic pages, though I'm trying to keep these to a minimum.

The markup language is XHTML 1.0 Strict, which is typed by me. I hate WYSIWYGs. The style is defined in Cascading Style Sheet. I've tried to be as standards-compliant as possible so have been making use of the validators for CSS and XHTML at www.w3c.org. As a result of recently changing to EtText for generating the content of the page, this may be broken at present.

Hosting

The site is hosted by The Skynet Project, aka the Computer Society in the University of Limerick. They run an Apache web server on a Debian GNU/Linux machine. I'm currently enjoying a 10-year membership which is due to expire in 2012.