About This Site
Posted Sunday January 15, 2006
I’m a bit of a gear-head, when it comes to the Web; I love to know how things work. Every time I visit a new site, I look to see what powers it, who hosts it, how things appear to be put together; seemed like I should give that information up about WadeArmstrong.com.
The quick answer is that WadeArmstrong.com is run using a combination of Movable Type, PmWiki and PHP, and is hosted by DreamHost, an LA-area Web hosting company that offers feature-rich, support-light, inexpensive hosting programs that are well-suited to people who can carry out most of their server management tasks themselves. The long answer is below:
What Powers the Articles on WadeArmstrong.com?
One of the biggest challenges in running a Web site is managing content. Entering new content, editing old content, managing archives, maintaining templates and updating old articles with new templates - all of these are major challenges on any site with more than just a few articles or a couple of static pages. In my past life, when I was doing front- and back-end design and coding for Web sites, I spent most of my time writing content management systems. Today, a number of systems have become established as legitimate choices for content management in smaller sites; I use one called Movable Type.
Movable Type provides great interfaces for entering new articles and editing old articles, and automatically manages archives, providing lists so that site visitors can browse through these archives and contextual links between archived pages, managing visitors’ comments on pages, automatically generating navigation toolbars and links, and even automatically updating old pages whenever I change the site’s look.
How Does That Contact Me Form Work?
Remarkably enough, the Contact Me form is also powered by Movable Type! There are a million PHP-powered contact forms, each more complicated (or insecure!) than the last; I needed something reliable, simple, and which provided protection from spam and other security breaches. The Contact Me form is a Movable Type comment box, placed in a separate blog from my articles. This blog is not set up to display comments, but is set up to e-mail them to me. So, I get the industrial-strength anti-spam tools in Movable Type, a reliable, secure mailing system, and, even, a record of all of the messages sent through the form.
How Does the Resumé Page Work?
The Resumé page is also a separate blog powered by Movable Type. In this case, I’m leveraging Movable Type’s editing tools to make it easy to modify the text that comes before the download link.
What About The Projects Section?
The Projects section is a wiki, a kind of Web site designed for collaborative writing. My wiki is set up so that my colleagues working on projects with me can log in and get access to the projects they’re working on, while not seeing the projects they aren’t working on. This helps us all exchange information and keep up on the status of our projects, while preserving confidentiality (where necessary). I use software called PmWiki, a PHP-based system that includes substantial customization ability as well as a lot of third-party enhancements, yet is simple to set up and runs on most common UNIX hosting plans (and many Windows hosting plans).
And All of Those .php Pages?
You may have noticed that all of the addresses of pages in WadeArmstrong.com end with .php, rather than .htm or .html. PHP is a language that makes it easy to carry out certain kinds of programming tasks for Web pages; most often, it’s used to dynamically-generate pages. In this case, however, I’m using PHP to glue together three different Movable Type blogs: my articles, about me, my resumé, and the contact form.
Why four blogs? Movable Type is a great tool but it presupposes that you have your site organized into categories, each of which contains articles, and that these categories are somehow related. This is true of the articles on WadeArmstrong.com, but the resumé and contact forms are not related to the articles (librarians understand what I’m saying here), and site visitors don’t want to click once to get to the contact section and then a second time to get to the contact form. I use PHP to, effectively, reach down into the hierarchy of two other Movable Type blogs and pull out the page I want (in technical terms, I just use PHP to “include” other pages in the framework of this site). This is a technique I’ve used extensively to glue together a lot of unrelated and highly-categorized and -organized content on another site, I’ve written an introduction to this technique here.