ASI Yearbooks TO-DOs and Concepts
When I put the yearbook site together back in 2002, I was in a hurry to finish before the Las Vegas reunion. I resisted using CSS, as most people were still using browsers that didn't support it particularly well. The web server was a weak in the knees Power Macintosh 6100/60 running Linux, so I didn't want to bog the thing down with PHP, either. Instead, I generated the hundreds of static html pages needed using a short Perl script, and manually cleaned up any loose ends.
The results seemed to satisfy the alumni who've visited the site, other than being sloooooow to serve up pages before I juiced up the DSL uplink speed. Now that a few years have passed, I'm getting in the mood to both bring the coding up to current html standards, and to add a few features. Among my intentions are to:
- [Done] Replace the Javascript menus with CSS menus. As a bonus, they'll look much cleaner.
- Structure page content using CSS rather than tables. Try and deal with minor display issues on some browsers while I'm at it.
- Since they'll need to be updated anyway for the CSS, add some features to the page generator scripts.
- [Done] Redo the look of a few non-yearbook pages, such as the 'About' page.
- [Done] Add a gallery section for snapshots and miscellaneous images, probably using an existing cgi such as Gallery or My Photo Gallery.
- [In Work] To better support a gallery cgi, replace thttpd with server software that supports FastCGI. [Update 1/09] I installed My Photo Gallery, which doesn't support FastCGI. At some point, I want to move to Gallery, which I'll host using Cherokee.
- [In Work] Add a name search function. Typing in the name list could end up to be a chore, if I'm to include enough information to be useful. [Update 3/08] I've added a prototype search function for the smallest yearbook, 1974. I'll gradually work my way from there.
- [Done] Rehost from the current Powerbook G3 266 to a spare iMac G3 400. [Update 1/08] The march of progress drops a used G4 tower in my lap, to which I added OS X 10.4, RAM, disk space, and a dual processor upgrade.