About Fat Guys Building Boats
This website is dedicated to the notion that
no time is so valuable that it cannot stand to be wasted.
Indeed, every portion of this web site is guaranteed to be a
waste of both your time and mine. If at the end of your
browsing, you sit back and say to yourself, "Damn. You know, I
could have spent the last few minutes working on that cure for
cancer I've been mulling over," then I've accomplished what I
set out to do.
A big fat waste of time? I wouldn't have it any other way.
Comments? Post them on the
Reader Rants
page, and share them with the world.
Kevin Walsh
Editor in Chief, Fat Guys Building Boats
A Note on How This Website is Constructed
Anyone who has attempted to create a website with lots
of content that is also reasonably easy to update has
inevitably reached the point where you ask yourself if it
isn't possible that there is a better way. Well, there is. If you
don't have the in-house talent, you
can:
Hire a hugely expensive consulting firm to implement an
entirely custom data-driven content management system
Hire a hugely expensive consulting firm to implement an
off-the-shelf data-driven content management system.
Get some in-house talent.
Fortunately, I am lucky enough to be my own in-house talent,
and a member of a hugely expensive consulting firm to boot. So
I wrote my own.
Each page of this site starts with a template file that describes
the top and side menus. For each unique page, the content is derived
from XML data and XSL stylesheets. Originally, the pages were generated
from XML data when the user selected the page for viewing, however,
there are a lot of differences between browsers on XML support, not
to mention varying degrees of conformance with HTML standards, and
there were complaints that pages couldn't be read.
I therefore decided that every page would be static HTML, compatible
with a lowest-common-denominator browser capability. I still use XML/XSL
to derive pages, which makes updating the site vastly simpler,
but I generate static HTML on my personal computer and then post
the resulting pages to this server. This has worked out rather
well, although it's nowhere near as cool as dynamically generated
pages.
With respect to tools, for layout and publishing to Tripod, I use Microsoft Front Page, for XML/XSL and scripting and debugging work,
I use Microsoft Visual Studio.NET Release Candidate 1 (2001 PDC bits).
For graphics creation I use Microsoft PictureIt!
For custom management tools, I use Microsoft C#, part of the new Visual Studio.NET languages.
All in all, from idea to publishing the site took about five
days, mostly consumed with conceptualization and deciding upon
layout options. I spent lots of time looking at other sites to
mine for ideas for look and feel, then playing with various
layout and color scheme approaches. Once that was done, the
actual nuts and bolts of building the site and the management
tools were relatively small, since I knew what I wanted to do.
Just goes to show you, planning is everything.
Winner of the coveted Walsh Award!
A wholesome, nutritious site for kids of all ages!
