updating website
After months of procrastination, I decided to update my website. One of thing that had been bothering me was that it was getting too hard to update. Not the look. With css, updating the looks are somewhat easy. The problem was more that if I wanted to update, say the menu system, I had to edit a ton of pages. Small changes like updating the copyright just wasn’t happening unless it happened to be on page that I was editing a lot.
At first, I was considering installing a CMS or the very least, just let WordPress manage the site (which is quite capable of). But the software engineer in me doesn’t really like a solution that basically creates static pages dynamically. Waste of resources. Most CMS only forces your pages into their look and feel, and though I could work until I got my look ‘n’ feel, it would be too much work for too little gain.
But what is a CMS, anyways (at least web kind)? Well, it helps managing the files. You create templates, so that you can focus on the content and still get a consistent look’n'feel.
Managing files are easy. Being a software engineer, I’m used to source control systems, so that part was pretty much taken care of. The creating templates isn’t that hard either, if you are on an unix-like system. The scripting support on those systems are superb, so it wouldn’t really take much effort to write a template system to generate the static files.
Since I was going to make this change, I decided to do it in Perl while I was at it. Mostly because I haven’t worked much in Perl, and it would be an interesting challenge. It actually went really well. Took me a couple of hours, mostly because I needed to look up different functions in Perl, but in the end, I think I got the flexibility I wanted.
