This website used to be a mix of PHP scripts and XHTML files generated by some big, complicated XSL documents, Java programs and Python scripts, all co-ordinated by an Ant script. In short it was a mess. I’ve replaced the whole lot with a Ruby on Rails application backed by a Postgresql database. All pages are generated dynamically from the database. By keeping everything in the database I hope to make backing up a lot simpler.
The ‘static’ pages, such as the index and the site info pages are created using Comatose while the blog, photos and moving light pages are home grown. The site relies on a number of other plugins to get stuff done, mixed with an awful lot of my own code. The blog is home made, after seeing so many examples of how easy it is to make a blog using RoR on the Web I thought I’d try to do it myself. IIt turns out that it’s not quite so straightforward in real life. I may yet switch over to Mephisto, or something similer. I still prefer to host my own photos etc, rather than putting them on Flickr or suchlike. I have a lot more control over how they are laid out and displayed.
The site is now hosted by Planet Argon using Mongrel and Nginx after the mysterious disappearance of my old hosting company.
There is still stuff missing from the site which I hope to get sorted at some point. As the site is now completely different I can’t just copy and paste pages across. The old computing pages have been reinvented as blog entries, which is why this blog has posts from 2002. The ‘posted at’ dates for those come from the CVS repository for the old site, so I think they’re fairly accurate.
I hope to add some more posts soon about how I solved some specific problems on this site.