farbot.com

The MKI remains a primitive and nearly abandoned fan site based on mostly static HTML pages. Last time I spent any time on it was a couple of years ago.

The site is comprised of "sources". These are individual things like a movie or tv show. Each of those has a small number of data elements to it.

Originally the 40 or 50-someodd sources were written up as plain HTML. A couple of years ago I started a little experiment, converting one of them to use a data-driven source template page, but didn't get far with it. I spent a little time today figuring out what I'd been trying to do and completed the source page, with a couple of wrinkles.

Firstly, it doesn't handle images in the file section yet, and I'll probably modify it to put images in a separate section. Secondly, my hasty implementation led me to realize I could more logically structure the underlying flat data file that drives it. I'll have to look into that. Thirdly, it turns the whole item text into a hyperlink instead of letting me specify a single word. I could make every one of them use a simple (link) word or tiny image for that purpose, but for now the hyperlink of the text is fine. One nifty feature is that the last page change pulls the modify timestamp from the source's file. It's very easy to do in PHP, but it's nice not to have to hand-change a timestamp in the item's data.

All of this is kind of moot considering that I plan to someday replace the whole thing with a database-driven system for recording, searching, and reordering any kind of event or thing related to a central person or thing. But even I recognize that these days the pace of development on my website has become glacial at best. So finishing this little script was a nice exercise in re-discovering how much thought I'd put into categorizing data associated with an actor. A lot of the schema information that drives the data-driven source page will probably make it into the database-driven version of the system if it ever appears, so it's not entirely wasted effort.

And if I get bored in the meantime, I can continue converting static pages into file-driven pages like the one source I've converted so far.

But if you want to see what the data-driven source page looks like, click here (dead link). To compare it to a non-data-driven source page, hit any of the other pages, like this one (another dead link).

Edits:
2007-01-11 PMunn: removed dead links.