The shoemaker's children get some shoes...
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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
make
and 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
... your inspiration here ...
(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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