These are the scripts I use to maintain the web site you're reading
right now. The web site is constructed solely of static HTML pages
that are regenerated as needed. For example, when I've added an
event to the master calendar file, I just type
Many people build web sites like this one using PHP or ASP or similar tools where the web server generates the pages on the fly. That's very wasteful. My philosophy is that that, for a primarily-non-dynamic site like this one (where only a very small number of pages change daily) the pages should instead be generated only once, at the time the change happens. Not only is it a more efficient use of server resources, but it also avoids opening you up to the kind of security holes that are endemic to tools like PHP.
I doubt these scripts will be directly useful to many people, but several people have asked how I do it, so here it is.
These scripts are all driven by a Makefile which contains shorthand, but you can guess what that looks like.
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HTML Templates
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| menuify.pl | This script reads a
"template"
file and updates the given HTML file to match the
template. This is what splices the left-side menu
onto each page. The content of the menu is defined
in this file. It also takes care of the logic of
not having a page link to itself: for example, on
the menu on the Directions
page, the "Directions" menu item is not clickable.
There are magic comments in the HTML pages that specify
which part of the page the text should go in: for example,
text that goes underneath the menu is bracketed by lines
that say
This script also contains a simple HTML validator, a more general version of which can be found over at jwz.org in validate.pl. |
| menuify-all.sh | This just does a "find" and runs menuify.pl on each HTML file on the site. This will overwrite any files that need to be changed, and leave them untouched otherwise. |
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update-latest- links.pl |
The menu itself points to URLs like "/calendar/latest.html", but there is no file on the site called "latest.html": instead there is an entry in the "/.htaccess" file that does an HTTP 302 redirect to a more specific URL like "/calendar/2005/02.html#15". This script runs nightly. |
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Calendar Pages
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generate- calendar.pl |
The raw calendar lives in a simple file
called "calendar.txt" and all of the HTML pages
under /calendar/
are generated from that. The syntax of that file has
a bunch of features (e.g., for repeating events) but
mainly it contains the date of the event, followed by
the HTML describing it.
There are a few special tags used in that HTML:
for example, it will say
This script also generates the RSS and iCal presentations of the calendar data, and a few other things. Like all the other scripts, this only overwrites files when their contents would have changed. |
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infoline-sable.pl infoline-mp3.pl |
If you have ever called our
telephone infoline,
you've noticed that it reads the calendar to
you in a computer-generated voice!
The text for that is created by
generate-calendar.pl. Then
infoline-sable.pl converts that into a "Sable" XML
file to use as input to the
Festival speech synthesizer; it has a zillion special-cases
to make Festival pronounce our various performer names correctly.
Finally,
infoline-mp3.pl runs Festival and creates an MP3.
It re-tries a few times until it ends up with an MP3 file
that is less than 3 minutes long (since that's the limit
our phone system gives us.)
Then (believe it or not) we update the outgoing message on our voicemail by holding the telephone up to the computer's speaker. |
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Flyer Gallery
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| flyerize.pl | Every time a promoter sends me an image of their event's flyer, I run this script on it, and it resizes the image(s) to the right size; copies them to the proper subdirectory and filename; and creates thumbnails. |
| wrap-flyers.pl | This regenerates any changed HTML files
under the /flyers/
directory, including updating the by-month and by-year
indexes. It also puts in the
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Photo Gallery
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| gallery.pl | This is the script that I use to generate the photo galleries themselves. It makes thumbnails and HTML wrappers for each image. It's pretty general-purpose. |
| wrap-gallery.pl | This regenerates any changed HTML files
under the /gallery/
directory, including updating the by-month and by-year
indexes. It also puts in the
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What's New Pages
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| build-index.pl | This regenerates the
by-month index of the "What's New"
weblog.
Most of the heavy lifting of keeping the blog pages linked together is done via "magic comments" that are handled by menuify.pl (described above.) |
| wrap-images.pl | This is a somewhat-specialized gallery generator that wraps HTML around the various images referenced by the "What's New" pages. It links those images back to the log entry in which they are first referenced. |
| generate-rss.pl | This parses the weblog HTML pages and generates an RSS file of the most-recent 6 entries. |
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Top Level Page
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randomize- snapshots.pl |
This picks a random set of six images from the whole image gallery and creates cleverly-sized thumbnails of them. It writes the HTML to a "staging" file for use by: |
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splice- frontpage.pl |
This takes the HTML snippet generated by randomize-snapshots.pl and splices it in to the top-level /index.html file. It does a similar trick for the "Calendar Overview", "Next Event", and "Upcoming live shows" boxes. This script runs nightly. |