Trying to serve up dynamic content? Well you have tons of solutions out there. You can use PHP, Java, Perl, Ruby and Python to create web pages. You can call CGIs, run a J2EE server, use WebObjects, or just roll your own. The most important thing is just getting the good results.

OK, OK. So not everything is working right yet. The drupal cron job is running so some feeds are starting to show up. I plan to add more and plenty of links to helpful websites. (I certainly have browsed a few of those trying to get drupal to work.) One big problem which has been there since the beginning is that transparent PNG files just don’t work on Windows Explorer. My apologies. A fix exists and I’ll try to get it implemented soon.

I started investigating Content Management Systems the other day. I was getting bored with my web site. I was tired of hand coding web pages and wanted to spruce up my blogs too and wasn’t looking forward to modifying the blog CSS to match my web site’s CSS. I’ve done this once already. I like the idea behind CSS. It is nice to be able to change the look of the web pages globally while leaving the html untouched.

I often like to complain about Windows. As a longtime Apple programmer I can’t help it. Growing up and growing old with this industry I’ve just seen too many ripoffs perpetrated by Redmond. I think that corporations get an imprint from their founders, and that imprint, those patterns of working and behaving stay with them for a long time. Many times they persist even after the founders have long since left the scene.

I have been programming for over 20 years now. The year I learned to program (in Fortran) was the last year the university had punch cards. By the next semester I was using a line printer and the next year a CRT. Only two years later I had purchased an Apple ][, although I was mainly working on minicomputers. (If you are too young to remember, they actually used to break things down as micro, mini and mainframe. There were never any maxi-computers, just super ones.)

Will the wonders of the world wide web ever cease? There are a lot of things about web technology that just don’t make a lot of sense. A lot of unixisms show through like a bad one-coat paint job. (And not everything about unix “makes sense” either. It’s just the way things are done. After all, the internet is a unix legacy.) What many people seem to love about the web is the way all these different technologies can work together to achieve results. My pet peeve is the way they don’t work together.

Well, the nightmare continues. I decided to try an Apache2 setup on my server. But using DarwinPorts I was unable to get subversion to build the mod_dav_svn. It wouldn’t put it into the already installed Apache2 server in /opt. I tried all the variants including building a DarwinPorts Apache2 installation. In the end, I decided to look at Fink which I haven’t tried in years.

I like to learn new things and when I started trying to change the look of my blog I realized I needed to learn CSS. Up until now I’ve viewed html and CSS as sort of a output language for tools such as Dreamweaver or GoLive. I figured if I ever was asked to write such a tool then I would learn it just as I learned Postscript once when I was writing some printing routines for a software application I was authoring. Well, I’m in the middle of learning CSS right mow.

I was bringing up subversion on my server. I used DarwinPorts to do the install on both my personal machine and the server. Ports seemed easier to me than my past experiences with Fink, but Fink does allow you to update all your installed software with just a few commands. DarwinPorts makes you do it package by package. But I am beginning to think that given how easily unix software breaks, I’d rather do my upgrades one at a time.