Extinction of Stone Age Blog IA (22nd May 2008)
At the moment, my blog has one page per month. Every entry from that month appears on that page and nowhere else. Putting each entry on its page and on the page for that month is optimal. That isn’t what I’ve do because this site is static HTML with some very badly written PHP wrapped around it.
But this blog is getting more people reading entries. People who are usually technically adept. It’s time to bite the bullet.
The blog archive page is now generated from a very rough PHP script. When I make an update I run the script. It finds the folders and pages, then produces HTML lists of links for them. These are written to the archives.html file.
This model provides updates when I need them without being run on every page view. I edit my pages in a text editor with a file and directory structure to organise them as before.
To get started, I’ve split up the January 2003 entries into separate pages and updated the index pages. Manually. None of this has gone live, it’s just to see what markup and organisation I like best. Think I’ve got it how I like it, though.
Next step is to automate the splitting and apply run through the rest of 2003. I’ll probably hack something together in VB6 to do this specific task.
Why not use an off-the-shelf, open-source, database-driven blogging system? Getting neat HTML into them seems like a pain compared to a text editor and FTP client.