[PlanetCCRMA] [OT] site database

[Steve Harris]

On Wed, Oct 23, 2002 at 06:05:46 -0700, Fernando Pablo Lopez-Lezcano wrote:
> > > Some sort of database searchable by keywords would be the thing to do, but
> > > that is science fiction at this point :-) 
> > 
> > No problems, if you have a db server and are not in a hurry I can knock
> > something up for you.
> 
> Wow, that'd be something! I'm not in a hurry at all :-)

OK, no problem. This is like the problem I'm tackling in my main research
area, but a billion times easier. :)
 
> [this is a bit off topic, maybe we should take it off the list]

Er, probably, but I've taken your address of the to: list, so next time ;)
 
> Anyway, the problem may be that my current method for creating the pages
> may be reaching the end of the rope (I was already thinking it was too
> "linear"). I currently just write latex and use latex2html for generating

Wow. Er... Wow. Thats probably the most extreme website mainatiance
program ever ;)

> all the pages. What it provides me and I could not live without is a way
> to create macros or small programs within the latex file itself so that,
> for example, a small command generates a reference to a package, url and
> all, and so on and so forth. Very easy, very convenient, saves a lot of 
> time. 

Shouldn't be a problem. We could either move it to PHP (its a pretty
simple perl like languge, but with a less nasty syntax), or if you want to
keep it static we could just post process the latex with something like
perl to do the SQL stuff. I don't even want to think about SQL enabled tex ;)
 
> I wonder what else is out there that is text based (I would not be happy
> to have to click my way through everything) and provides an embedded >
language so that I can just write everything up in the same text file(s),
> run a "compiler" and voila, the whole site is updated :-)

I hope you weren't suggesting that I might use something... GUI based! ;)

People dont really do it that way, it tends to be embedded scripts that
are dynamically run when the page is requested. Its lighter than it
sounds, so unless your webserver is CPU bound (very unlikly) it shouldn't
be a problem.

- Steve