tjameswhite.com

Crunch time is upon us. As the lack of posting tells you, I’ve been busy at home, and now the load at work is picking up. The next couple of weeks should prove interesting.

We are in the process of redesigning our corporate web site and are slated to launch on the 26th. Our site consists of several thousand pages total, most of which are static. Yup, that means touching nearly every one of them for the redesign. Also, we are on an old Sun/Solaris box with no server-side technologies other than perl and server-side includes. (Not entirely true - Java is on the machine, but we don’t have a dedicated Java developer.)

Things are, however, improving this time around. Since we don’t have an actual programmer/developer, my cohort and I have been fiendishly cobbling together a pseudo-dynamic site using every piece of bailing wire, gum and duct tape we can find.

For instance, he wrote a very cool Perl script for me that regenerates one of the largest bulks of data. All I had to do was build a template and strip out the old HTML framework (which I did via a script I wrote). His script merges the text file with the HTML template and generates a new, static, file. In about an hour I did what use to take a week. Sweet indeed.

I’ve also been spending a bunch of time hacking away at two WordPress installs to run our new press room and the reference reviews that I maintain. Of course, since our main box won’t run PHP, these are installed on a spare Windows box. Getting the site navigation to work across both has been fun.

I’ve also been learning a little perl in order to dynamically generate some frequently updated lists so we don’t have to manually update them anymore.

For the rest of the challenges, our online catalog is a series of Java scripts (built and maintained by a Java developer on loan) and we are trying to implement a new ASP driven knowledge base system (located on the same server as the PHP-powered WordPress).

It’s an eclectic site, but it works. And I’m actually rather proud of it.