How I Made This Website

Note: what follows is a brief, technical discussion on how I designed this website.

There are many ways to design a website, from manually writing every piece of HTML code you see to totally depending on a website production system to put it all up for you.

The path I choose was to have a system that would take whatever I write and put it into a web page that would maintain the 'look and feel' of my entire website. In short, I choose what I call a 'template engine'.

A template engine is a system that separates the content of a webpage from its presentation. Different HTML pages are produced by combining different content with the same template.

The result is output that has a consistent look, due to the common template. I can change the look-and-feel of my website by just changing the template and regenerating all my webpages. I have done this a few times already to add or remove common features or modify the way some parts of my webpages look.

There are many template engines out there. The one I have choose is called Cheetah, which is a Python based template engine. Python is a object-oriented programming language that I love to use because it is a powerful language, yet simple enough for me to understand how to use it...};-)

I won't go into detail on how Cheetah uses Python to generate my web site but what basically happens is:

I compose all my webpages (and some 'hidden' supporting template functions) in Cheetah's template language.
I then compile the temple files into python code
The python code is then executed to generate the final HTML output

Doing it this way brings several benefits:

I do not have to worry about HTML tags directly. All HTML tags are stored in a single template file as 'template calls' (something like function calls). When I need to use HTML tags, I get them via the template calls with appropriate parameters. This allows me to quickly modify or add HTML tags in the single template file instead of 'hunting' for and modifying HTML tags in all my documents manually.
Cheetah templates allow inheritence since it is based on Python (which is an object-oriented langauge). This means I can have a basic template and build additional templates on top of it by 'inheriting' the basic template. The base template gives the basic look-and-feel of my web pages. The inherited templates provides more information like the list of navigation links, etc. Finally, the content of each page inherits the top level template and uses it to customise the output. Really fun to do and easy to maintain and change.
Controlling which web pages are generated are done via a 'Makefile' and the GNU make utility. Make automatically takes care of checking which template files depend on which one (known as "dependencies"). Files that depend on a file I have changed get rebuilt automatically by make. If I change a basic template file, then almost all my web pages will be remade by Make (since almost all my template files depend on it) but if I change the content of one page, only that page (and a few others that depend on it) will be rebuilt by make. This takes the hassle out of checking which of my pages need to be modified if I change the content, navigation links or the look-and-feel of pages.

Cheetah is flexible and easy enough for me to use. Other template systems like Zope may be more powerful but for a simple, mostly static, web-site like mine, I find Cheetah to be more than adequate.

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