Another in the ‘Why?’ series - I’m looking at methods for delivering a site based on dynamic content - news, clients that sort of thing - and the primary frontend will be a beautifully constructed Flash movie (trust me, it will be beautiful!) but for SEO, accessibility, and general good practice there will be a beautifully constructed xhtml equivalent too.

So how to store and deliver the content? Flash reads xml very well, so it makes sense to pass the content in that format. So how about representing all the content in xml, and use xslt to transform it for html / wap / any other format? Got to be the way to do it!

So I do some research into the practicalities of the approach, and it’s a right palava! Assuming a standard hosting solution, you need the base xml file, the xslt transform file, then something to do the transform. I’m a big PHP fan, but xslt support is not yet bundled (like MySQL for instance) so you’ve got to reconfigure, and that took some doing. Then for every page you need a php script to use the xslt file to transform the xml file. And XPATH and all that jazz takes a bit of getting your head around.

So why not go ‘old skool’ and store the data in MySQL, read it directly using PHP? much easier - oh yes the Flash. That was going to have a bad time extracting meanigful content from a complex structure, so it makes sense to write a ‘translating’ script to prodcue just the data the movie needs in a nice digestable format - another transformation, or another PHP script reading MySQL data.

I know which way is easier, so it leaves one question … why XSLT?

Blinding bit of Open Source software - did exactly what it said on the can, I had it up and running in minutes.

Absolutely the best example I’ve come across in months of why I love Open Source software (since OpenVPN as it happens).

Can’t tell you what I used it for - othetrwise I’d have to kill you.

http://www.truecypt.org/

I did what I should have done in the first place - RTFM - and realised where I’d gone wrong with the kernel configuration (hopefully) in that the default config had the wrong processor family - now changed to K6/K6-II/K6-III. I also added ext3 journalling, and bluetooth subsystem support for good measure.

The kernel is compiling as I type - sure it won’t all be right, but I hope at least to get the system to boot.

Things I probably missed - I left networking alone so it might not find my card, and I left USB untouched too, so it might not find my Belkin bluetooth dongle. I didn’t want to tinker too much at this point as I could have made things worse by mistake.

<time passes… />

Kernel’s compiled - bugger- still not working.

Might be having to ask for help. Let’s have a look on the forum first like a good noob.

Kernel compilation took 36 minutes - won’t be doing that too often. I tinkered with ‘generic x86 support’ or somthing like that, recompiled and went for tea.

Just came back, tried rebooting, and it still reboots itself after a message saying ‘Bios data check successful’.

Must be something else then…

So while I’m waiting for my Gentoo kernel to compile, rather than drinking bourbon and folding paper (or browsing illicit web pages) let’s have a rant - after all, isn’t that what blogs are about?

I work for a fairly large ‘digital communications agency’ (new media in old-skool lingo) and we’re fortunate to have some fairly substantial budgets to work with, but that doesn’t mean life is easy.

My job, near the top of the food chain but in a technical capacity, is often to decide on a technical approach for particular projects. I hate re-inventing the wheel, and I’m lazy at heart, so if someone’s developed something that will do a job I’m more than happy to use or adapt it. (why do you think one of my categories is ‘tinkering’)

Today however, blessed with the fact that most of the Account Managers were out schmoozing clients and watching cricket test match, I spent most of the day perusing what’s available on the Open Source market for content management / blogs / community sites for a project with a ‘challenging’ budget.

My biggest challenge was figuring out what a particular package did, how it would make life easier, and what I’d have to do to demonstrate it to the decision makers. I had a fresh look at Joomla and Wordpress which I’d played with before, and finally got round to finding out what Drupal and some of the wikis (MediaWiki in particular) offer.

The alternative is either to start from scratch with a bespoke application (possible, but have we the budget) or extend our own set of CMS tools that we’ve been developing in recent times.

Joomla! I know quite well because I use it to drive the Happisburgh Village Website and Wordpress was considered to power this blog (still don’t know if I made the right call, but I do like this one so I’m sure I didn’t make the wrong one)

More later - I think I’m just getting warmed up…

At the end of my last wrestle with getting a Gentoo box up and running, I’d got to the ‘remove install CD and reboot’ bit, but the box gets stuck in a reboot loop so something’s wrong - knew it was going too well.

As I type, it’s rebooting with the install CD in again to have another attempt - I’ll scrutinise the Quick Install guide again to spot something I missed, but I’m highly suspicious of the kernel configuration section which I briefly looked at, then left everything as default.

Wish me luck…

Why? Because I want to play with bluetooth, and I found a howto based on the Gentoo operating system.

So I dig out an old box and go to install Gentoo. It can’t be that hard can it?

Five attempts later and I still can’t get more than a dozen steps through the quick install (?) guide, and as a last resort I post a message on the forum.

Almost instantly get a reply helpfully pointing out that my AMD K6-2 processor needs an i586 stage3 not the i686 as in the instructions.

So I’m further along a tortuous road, but there’s still a long way to go before I even get a bare box that boots itself - as I’m writing this the kernel is compiling and I have no idea if I’ve got all the modules I need configured.

Don’t know what the odds are of getting anything that I can achieve my (limited) goals on - I’ll report back.

I was at my old village primary school this weekend, helping out with their roadshow in support of their entry in BBC Restoration Village. The school has been closed since 1988 - I left 28 years ago!

Since it closed, the building has become derilict, and there are plans to redevlop it as a village centre (see the Pennoyer’s Centre website) but it all hinges on money.

Plenty about the project elsewhere - I just want to comment how wierd memory is - it’s like I was there in another lifetimebut it was only yesterday. Some of it seemed to be vivd recollections - some like it was seen in a movie.

I bumped into a few old friends I hadn’t seen since I was much shorter and instantly recognised them, some teachers who hadn’t changed a bit.

For someone who’s 39 today, looking back to when I was 11 is just … wierd.

Had to happen eventually I suppose - don’t know how many years I’ve been tinkering with technology and how many websites I’ve built, but never settled down to write a blog.

I set one of these up for a chap who works for one of our clients (www.williamrolls.com) so I know there’s no real excuse.

The thing is - I’ll have to write stuff now. Oh well…

Keep on a troshin’