August 2008 Archives

Thanks to PHP & SimpleXML, the main Avarthrel site now has a side bar with a site map. I just got a massive deja vu feeling - and yes, turns out it's not the first time I've written a side bar implementation. My Neverwinter Nights site had such a sidebar too, but it wasn't XML-based - it was raw included PHP4 code from... God knows when. Well, at least it still works. It appears I have utterly destroyed (save for the copies buried deep in Subversion) the Common Lisp -based madness.

As far as the Avarthrel website redesign goes, I've got to say I have a giant job ahead, because I'm not a Visual Guy. Yesterday, I told my friend that I have something specific in mind about the site's new design: "a bastard child of Thief: The Circle, T2X site, and Elfwood story pages". How interesting and original it turns out remains to be seen, but one thing is sure - it'll probably look much better than what's out there now.

Also, I started using rsync to push changes to the Avarthrel site. Since I have different configuration files for the development box and the webhost, and there's stuff I don't want on the webhost anyway (such as .svn directories), I can't push the files right on, and I've always used scp. But now, with a little bit of --exclude and --dry-run, it turns out updating stuff with rsync is actually pretty easy!

I've got a small problem in creating the website for Avarthrel, and it seems that I have to give up finding a boxed solution for it. I probably sound like a broken record when I ramble about this, but the thing is, I have to give up, admit that the quest is hopeless, and just write the whole darn thing myself when I have time. It's a lot of work, and until it's finished the site will look like junk, but there seems to be no other, elegant way.

Basically, updating the website isn't exactly easy as it stands. I have a very specific set of requirements: either use static source files (to allow Subversion revisioning) or built-in versioning, allow arbitrary HTML snippets in more or less curious places some systems just don't anticipate (for forms, random links in sidebar, etc), support metadata for source documents, etc, etc... some are so-close-yet-so-far (Apache Lenya is a good system, but making it do what I want as far as custom outlook goes needs a lot of work, and as far 2.0 goes, creating static HTML output means hand-tidying up a dump from wget, it seems), some others just sound like they'd be repeat of what I did here.

So, I'll just scrap the idea of rebuilding the site in some neat software package and do it myself. I have to focus on the content and rebuild some of the ugliest parts of this site's infrastructure... One day, we may even have subdirectories and stuff!

When I first started the internal wiki, it used Instiki, which had one good feature at the time: The whole wiki could be exported to HTML or Textile format with a few clicks. Good, because an upgrade broke the thing.

I'd definitely want to produce a static version of the wiki for the Avarthrel website one day... but right now, I'm looking at various MediaWiki dumping tools, and I seem to be - somehow - not getting anywhere. The obvious choice would be the Collection extension, but it doesn't seem to work too well for me (I'm getting some weird database errors - people, all the world isn't MySQL...)

But just how hard can it be to produce one stinking HTML dump from a website?

Okay - I seem to be making progress. I found DumpHTML. There is hope! Perhaps one day, you'll get a static copy of the site!

UPDATE:
% php5 dumpHTML.php 
DB connection error: No database connection
zsh: segmentation fault  php5 dumpHTML.php

Never before in my illustrious programming life have I experienced PHP interpreter segfault. Oh well, maybe there's a way to get this thing to work...

I was wondering why the hell the rebuild was so fast. Well, turns out Movable Type 4.2 upgrade (with templates reset) completely messed up my archiving. Old blog posts are still there - they just don't get linked archived. What the hell?

Trying to resolve this somehow.

UPDATE: Fixed now. For some reason, the forum had it that I needed to open entry templates and save them. The world is a weird place.

Just a quick update - I upgraded to Movable Type 4.2 and would like to know if stuff works. Don't mind the dust, please!

As far as status updates go, I've been in a kind of a slump recently - I really didn't have time or energy to write anything this summer. Very awful, that. I've tweaked the story I've been working on this week, however, and discovered some truly awful passages of text. It can happen to everybody!