N.C. Raves: How the site works
About this site : How the site works (3 of 3)

How the pages are delivered (techincal)

More than eighty pictures make up the site in its current incarnation, and the pages are delivered via a template system. If I want to change the look of the site (bump up a font size, say), I change one or two files and immediately, all eighty reflect the change. It makes administration of the pages, as well as tweaking design, much easier.

Page design: Used GoLive CyberStudio 2.0 and 3.0 to sketch templates and tweak design. Most of the HTML was hand-tweaked later. Macromedia FreeHand 7.0 was used for graphics, which unfortunately had to be made web-ready in Photoshop. (FreeHand 8.0 takes away some, but not all, of the Photoshop steps.) The old version of the site used frames in the story -- I nixed them from this version to help the site get indexed by search engines and to reduce screen clutter.

Templates: There are eight page templates in the site. Six are for picture pages, differing in position (is the photo to the left or right of the caption?), size (regular or small), and orientation (horizontal or vertical). One is for pages with mostly text, like this one. The last is for "printing pages," pulling up a higher resolution photo and putting the caption on a plain background without any formatting.

The templates are delivered using server-side includes. When the user's browser calls up a page (like this one), the file it's reading actually contains little HTML. Instead, it puts information (like the title and the caption) into variables, then hands off the making of the page to one of the templates. Here's what that photo page actually looks like (link opens new window).

This system means that each of the template files has to be hand-programmed with the correct information, though I've set up some applescripts to take care of some of the work. One of the scripts puts the pages in each story in the desired sequence. If I want to rearrange photos, I change a setting in the script and let it churn out new pages, which I have to upload to the server. It's not the best way to do things, by far, but it beats hand-tooling a bunch of HTML when changes need to be made.

How it should have been done

The whole thing should have been programmed into relational database, which would hold caption and photo information and deliver it to the user with templates. Ideally, it would also allow better search options, discussion boards, and user customization. The site could be administrated on the web, from any browser (with the correct password, of course), with scripts that would change the order of photos or edit captions.

Here's the best part, though: with a database, users could contribute their own images, captions, and audio. They could, in effect, create a self-sustaining documentary. They would scan (or buy PhotoCDs of) their photos, upload them through their browsers, and add caption information. They could administer their own stories and advertise them from the home page. (Excite and some of the other portals are looking into doing just this sort of thing, and probably have something up by now.)

There would have to be some controls and supervision, so that someone didn't start up a bulletin board full of porn, or post enormous multi-megabyte pictures. Still, it's entirely doable, and perfectly suited to this audience and the medium of the internet. Too bad I'm not a better programmer, or you would have seen it in this version of the site.

Image from the photo story

This page is part of a sequence discussing technical issues pertaining to this site.

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