Dustin's Programming Stuff

Upgrading

[dking.org] / [Programming] / [2010] /

I'm splitting the programming stuff off from the main blog. This will hopefully make the main blog less annoying for non-programmers who read it, if anybody still does. And for this programming section I'm "upgrading" from my homegrown PHP blogging system to hand-coded HTML.

I will enumerate the reasons in an unordered list:

• To give me more fine-grained control of the page.
• To learn the web at a lower level.
• It reminds me of old school sites done this way.
• By the pain of hand-coding HTML, to force myself to either write or find a CMS that works the way I want, or give up in disgust.
• To get an idea of the structures such a CMS would need to support.

The "way I want" would ideally mean that it:

• generates clean, static HTML that will work on any web host (or downloaded to somebody's hard drive),
• allows fine control over that HTML,
• provides a web-based WYSIWYG editor that allows editing of new or already existing pages without having to think about the underlying HTML,
• updates feeds in RSS, twitter, or other tweeting platforms automagically (or with custom messages),
• supports blogging as well as a more unstructured format, like using the web as your "personal C: drive".

So if I can get sufficiently annoyed to start working on this, I will probably use Clojure. I'm trying to make it my non-work language of choice, because I'd like to become fluent in a Lisp dialect. In the meantime I've started making a simple game using Clojure and Swing. The Swing part is in Java and contains the raw graphics and keyboard events. The actual responses to the events and the vector graphics logic are in Clojure. I wonder if it's common to have a "Java layer" in clojure programs. I guess that's what the interop is there for.