Now that fears over the Y2K bug have pretty much calmed down I figured it would be a good time to upgrade my web site to use some good ol’ fashion 21st century web technology. I’ve begun adding dynamic elements to my pages using PHP. The high-level goal is to make the site more template driven so I can update content easily and have configurable views. For example, I’d like to be able generate pages in my origami section that display the models in a particular subject or from a particular year on-the-fly. Toward that end, as a proof-of-concept I designed a drop-in header and footer that can be passed args for Title and Section. Many thanks to Jeannie for helping with creating these templates.
So far I’ve implemented the templates in the “back half” of my site – the less visited sections Multimedia, Movies, Art, and Spew. Now that I know it’s working, I’ll be getting around to the rest of the site in the next few days. In the meanwhile, please alert me if you come across any broken links while the transition is on. The payoff is, going forward, if I want to for example add a new section, I can just update the footer file with the new link rather than having to go in and edit every single page. Now the real fun begins. Soon I will begin going thru my sub-pages to create more sophisticated reusable content blocks and begin serving more and more parts of the site dynamically.