More techno mumbo jumbo
by luc • 6 March, 2003 • Tech • 1 Comment
Thursday already! Time flies when you’re having a good time! It’s hard to believe that I have been here for 2 months already. Just one more week and I will fly back to Belgium to make preparations for the final move.
Actually I haven’t been doing a lot this week. I was terrible weather, with storms and rain, a few electricity break downs, no weather to be wandering around in the streets. I did do quite a bit of work on the design of the website though. First I installed a new version of MovableType, the software engine that drives this weblog. While updating, I ran into some problems which necessitated a visit to the excellent support forum of MovableType. There I came across a few more sites with really good pointers for separating content from presentation. I followed up on those pointers and am now almost completely ready with the transformation of both the entry page and this weblog. That took the better part of Monday and Tuesday.
Wednesday and today I tried to apply the same principles to the Guestbook, but that turned out to be a whole lot harder that I had thought. Unlike MovableType — which is nicely architectured in 3 layers, with a Perl engine connected to a mySQL database at the bottom, above that a number of XHTML templates and on top of that the CSS style sheet — the software for the Guestbook is one big lump of code with PHP talking to the database, intermingled with plain HTML full of mark-up and layout code. It’s a nightmare to split that into presentation and content sections. So I have been looking for alternatives. Although there is a wealth of guestbook software out there on the web, very few have the features that I want. I really like the fact that people can include a picture of themselves with an entry. It makes it so much more “personal”. But those that have that feature are all from the same old school of HTML layout. Those that do implement the modern standards as set out by the W3C all lack the option to include a photo. I think I’ll leave the guestbook in the current format until I have found a better alternative.
Then I have been looking for a decent “photo gallery” package that can run on my server. Same problem here, those with a flexible setup and support for CSS and XHTML are a bit lacking in the feature department. I have been on the web, staring at listings of hundreds of packages for six hours in a row and I still haven’t found what I like. But, “Je maintiendrai”, as the Dutch say…
On an only slightly ralated subject, my downstairs neighbour has a Wi-Fi link to the university which gives him a continuous connection and download times of 500KB (that’s byte, not bit) per second. I’m green with envy. He won’t let me have access ’cause that’s against university regulations. So close, and yet so far away…
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