Category: www.nickhodge.com

Legacy posts from the old blogging engine

InDesign at ACP

For those interested in InDesign. The ‘engineer’ mentioned is, err, me.

How the mungenetengine works is a quickie description of what is going on behind the scenes.

There’s another rewrite in my head. In my features database, there are 21 to-dos. So many ideas, so little time. The more I think about mungenetengine, I realise that there is a better way. At the moment, the render engine is tied up in one object- not the best way to create a OO application.

When you ‘write’ your own application, and run it live, its easy to see how difficult it is to create large applications like Photoshop or InDesign. Let alone an operating system…

mungenetengine

Welcome to Mungenet 6.

This one is a little different to the previous versions – the page fragments are stored in a MySQL database and dynamically created using a 1000-line PHP opus called the mungenetengine. The structure of the site is also stored in the database, too. This permits the navigation to be dynamically generated. Links to external sites (or static files on this server) are stored, too. One change will results in easier management. Also stored in the database are any binary files: images, PDFs and ZIP files.

Why dynamically build this site? It makes it much easier to add elements on the fly, without having to change and upload many static files – which is especially the case with navigation elements. Normally, if you add another sibling page (a page in a directory that is related to the other pages) – you have to update all pages in that directory to reflect the new entry. I believe that navigation gives you, the user of this site, context. So keeping this syncronised is important.

PHP Week

Holiday nearly over, still more programming left undone. For those interested in creating dynamic web sites, let me give a little plug to PHP After coding most of the week, I�ve found this programming language extremely productive. About the only thing that I miss is a development environment with a debugger (but I do know that they are out there for PHP)
The last languages/environments I felt this positive about were: Java in WebObjects and an obscure language called VICOMscript which was a part of a terminal emulation/front end development package called VICOM Pro
For those who are not interested in programming, I will be returning to write some more guides on Photoshop, Illustrator and Acrobat in coming weeks.

SVGZone

The short tutorial on SVG intro at Adobe web site. (in the SVG Zone)

The Pacific Area Newspaper Publisher s Association Technical Advisory Committee (PANPA TAG) has recently published their PANPASpecs (PDF Guidelines for Newspaper Advertising Delivery)

I have been spending time with PHP and MySQL — and I am nearly ready to install my own content management system for the front page. Crash course in configuring Server-Side-Includes for Apache as well as a slide side slip into Python.

XMLRPC, PHP, AppleScript

Completed some very small example projects using XML-RPC. Clients in Visual Basic, PHP and AppleScript – and a server in PHP

As a part of the next roadshow these examples will be shown to all and sundry — I will also post the code here for perusal. MySQL is a part of this project as well. I have it installed under MacOS X 10.1 and Windows 2000.

PHP, whilst an excellent scripting language for server-side HTML scripts, I can understand why it is easy to mix up your presentation (HTML) with code (PHP) and loose track of your project. Even with objects and external include files, it lacks the MVC (Model-View-Controller) paradigm that is required for good OO and maintainability. Maybe its time to brush up on the Java skills?

Radio Userland

Starting to spend some time with Radio Userland, a desktop based blogging tool. Having been out of the Userland Frontier loop for a couple of years, its taking time to catch up with the latest goings-on. The aim is to see if I can move to a locally based engine – or create some sort of backend on this server.