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The shoemaker's children get some shoes... |
While I've been building web sites for clients since 1996, I've never gotten around to building one for myself... The main tools used were vi, m4, and make. The site is setup as a series of "skeleton" files which are then processed by the macro processor m4 to produce the actual XHTML. Currently about 6000 lines of XHTML are generated from about 1000 lines of skeleton file, making this reasonably cost-effective (even counting the day or so it took to setup the makefile and the m4 macro definitions). At this point, if I want to make a change (such as adding this paragraph to this page), I vi site.skl makeand a fraction of a second later (rebuilding the entire site takes only .3 seconds) a fresh site.htm
page comes out of the oven.
The site.skl file itself is basically a sandwich:
a header macro,
a footer macro,
and a blank space awaiting inspiration between:
asc_header (The "your inspiration here" is generally the tricky part.) Once the framework was up, adding content is largely a matter of deciding what to put in the sandwich: this approach gives almost complete orthogonality between presentation and content. I modeled the original design after my friend Lester Knutsen's site http://www.advancedatatools.com. I built this site on a G4 Mac running OS X (the Mac's version of UNIX). The twelve GIFs used in this site were made with Adobe Illustrator and the one JPG with Adobe Photoshop Elements. The Mac editor BBEdit was used to build an earlier version of this site, and is currently used to check the XHTML files built from the templates. -- John Ashmead |
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