Legends of the Sun Pig

If you’re seeing this, that means that our new content management system, Movable Type is up and running on Sunpig. Updating the site should now be much easier and more conventient for us.

I’m still working on converting everything over to the new structure, though, so the site may look a little bit flaky for a while… Normal service will be resumed as soon as possible 🙂

Okay, I still don’t have a full working version of Movable Type up and running yet. (I’ve got the blog creation and edit screens working on Windows, but the pages aren’t rebuilding yet. Something to do with the Unix.pm module.) But from what I’ve seen so far, it looks really good. The code is well constructed. The content creation interface is slick. And the things you can do with it look to be the kind of things I want to do with Sunpig.

See the interview with Ben and Mena Trott, who built the system, and have a look at Dollarshort.org for an example of what MT can do.

Messing around with blogging tools.

I’ve got a test installation of Greymatter going, and I’m trying to spin up MovableType as well. Now I need to figure out if I can make these tools do what I want, or if I need to proceed with my own weblog implementation.

Sunpig is currently built on PHP/MySQL. Using the web editing interface, we can create day entries, and we can edit the left-hand sidebars. There’s a file upload function, but it’s not really usable in its current format.

What we can’t do is easily change the format of our log pages, or archive pages. We also can’t use the interface to create new static pages, although I suppose that a fixed pointer to a past daily entry would suffice.

I’ve looked at, and discared the idea of using Blogger or Frontier (or a Frontier-based service like EditThisPage.com). Both of them give you a very snazzy web interface for creating and editing your blogs. I would like the blogging tools to reside at sunpig.com, though. Blogger will allow you to publish to any site you like, but the tools remain at Blogger.com. And in order to get Frontier installed on sunpig.com, I’d probably have to invest in a dedicated server, which is waaay too expensive.

Greymatter is interesting. It’s a set of Perl scripts, which you place on your own site (provided you can run cgi scripts). These scripts allow you to create and edit your blogs in a very flexible manner, using templates.

I love the whole template thing. If I decide, in the end, to write my own tools for doing the sunpig logs, I will definitely be building a template-based system.

Greymatter has a number of disadvantages, though. First of all, its method of data storage concerns me. For each day entry, it stores both a .cgi data file (containing the text of the entry), and an HTML file, which contains the text with all your templates applied to it.

From the point of view of serving up your files, this is great. All the hard work is done when you apply the template (when you edit the file), and when someone requests the page, all the web server has to do is serve up a single file. The downside is that if your templates are large, each HTML file will take up a large amount of space. Say each page is 25K (not difficult if you include the HTML for a calendar). After 40 entries, you’ve used up 1MB of space, regardless of how big those entries were.

We’ve got 100MB to play with on Sunpig. This may sound a lot, but it gets eaten up very quickly by the amount of photographs we’re putting up. We’ve already used up close to 25MB. I can easily see us running out of space within a year if we don’t manage this carefully. I’m reluctant to just trade off space for performance, when this is really just a family site. It only gets a couple of dozen hits a week.

Secondly, the process of updating and re-applying templates across all files seems prone to errors, and to screwing up your site. You’re not allowed to interrupt Greymatter while it’s performing this update. I’ve heard stories of this going badly wrong, due to simple things like a modem dropping a connection, or accidentally shutting down your web browser.

I’m convinced of Greymatter’s flexibility: in that regard it is great. You can run as many instances of it on your site as you like, and this is probably how I would do our web logs vs static articles. But I am not convinced of its robustness and reliability. Noah Gray, who wrote it, has said that he won’t be producing any new versions (at least, for now).

There is an active community of users who appear capable of fixing most things that go wrong, though. And because you download the code and put it on your own web server, you can edit the code yourself.

This, however, is another reason for mistrusting the application. The code is horrible. It’s one monolilthic cgi perl script, full of variables, constants and functions with nondescriptive names like “thomas” or “FUNNYFEETRELEASE”. Just thinking about it makes me shudder.

However, despite it all, the blogging interface itself is relatively easy to use. Which may well be an overriding requirement for Sunpig.

I’ve only really started looking at MovableType this evening, and I don’t have a working installation yet, but certainly the code behind it looks better. It has the disadvantage of being a 1.0 release, but the folks who developed it look like they’re actively progressing new releases and bug fixes. Which can only be a good thing.

I don’t know how its file structure works yet, but I’m going to play about with it some more, and we’ll see what happens.