London.pm web site (was: [ANNOUNCE] [SOCIAL] blah blah)

[Andy Wardley]

Simon Wistow wrote:
> I'm looking at doing various things to the website. 

Me too.  Or rather, I am, er, was doing.  Intrigued by the 3-Step 
Crack-Fuelled XML Transmogrification Process [tm] required to build the 
site, I took a look at it.  Turns out you can all do it using ttree and 
a few well-placed site wrappers.  So I did.  Much cleaner.

I also re-coded the templates that generate the user interface to make it
all CSS driven (although at the moment, I haven't gone through and added all
the crap required to make it work properly on IE).  I was planning to add
a couple of different stylesheets just to illustrate the general funkiness
of stylesheet-based web sites. 

And while I was at it, I rebuilt the crazy XML view to use a bunch of
separate templates (much easier to understand that way, IMHO), added 
some proper entity declarations to the XML (so you can write ©
instead of (c)) and generally cleaned up anything I could find.

I only put a couple of content pages in, but it's mostly a case of 
copying them into place and adding a stub HTML page template to load
the XML (which I think is a better way to do it than the 3SCFXMLTP[tm]).

There's still some other stuff to do.  Like setting the active menu item, 
generating a table of contents for each page, and $lordy only knows 
what else I didn't get a chance to look at.

In general, I hope it's a good example of the right way to (re-)build a TT
driven web site.  Maybe I'll do a tutorial or tech talk on it some time?

In the mean time, you can browse the source, look at the site (index.html 
and about/index.html only ATM) and download a copy of it from here:

  http://wardley.org/london.pm/

Including:

  http://wardley.org/london.pm/London.pm_abw_0.01.tar.gz  # whole caboodle
  http://wardley.org/london.pm/html/                      # browse pages
  http://wardley.org/london.pm/html/admin/                # how it works

The last page listed there contains some basic instructions about how it's
put together.  Incomplete, I'm afraid, but better than nothing.

Hope it's useful.

> Any help towards any of these would be sorely appreciated and rewarded 
> in Beer (or other easily transferred comestibles). 

I claim beer!

> Any companies wishing to generously donate the time of a kickass HTML 
> coder would be gently fellated. In a metaphorical sense.

My company claims gentle fellatio!  (in a metaphorical sense).  Although
I can't claim to be able to kick my own ass.  Perhaps I could get someone 
else to kick it for me?

:-)

A