[rfk-dev] Re: website layout

[Peter A. Peterson II]

Quoting joof@gmx.de:
> Hi rfk community!
> 
> I've just surfed on: http://www.robotfindskitten.org/ and it was great fun
> to check out the robot simulation.
> 
> However I'm very interested in samp's and loiosh's bash and perl scripts to
> create the www.robotfindskitten.org (tm) website layout.
> 


JF, 

I came upon the idea for the layout when I realized you could embed HTML
tags inside a <pre> tag, and after I found out how poorly the frame and
table handlers for lynx were. Unfortunately, my perl skills were
extremely (extremely) minimal, so I asked some friends with perl
knowledge for help.

samp, loiosh and I (pedro) wrote the scripts to put the site together,
and it's pretty straightforward; all the perl script does is zips the
left and right columns together -- the headers and footers are actually
currently put on with shell scripting. And the site is not dynamic,
since updates don't occur regularly enough for that. So you edit the
source for the page (generally just the right-hand column) and then you
run the script which generates the html document. That being said, it
wouldn't be too hard to turn this into a dynamic script. And I have
plans to make it do fancier things like borders and whatnot. 

But you're welcome to take a look:

http://robotfindskitten.org/src/

I put the actual pages for index.html in the examples direcory, but you
should know that gp and bzert are in the robotfindskitten.org/ directory
and are run from there.

Also, see http://tastytronic.net/ufo/ for an example of another set of
pages made with the scripts.

As I said, I intend to extend the capabilities of the scripts and
release them under the GPL, but if you'd like to use them yourself for
something, I don't see how that would be a problem. My wishlist looks
something like this:

	* borders
	* dynamic construction of pages
	* storing news items (or maybe everything) in a different
	  format, not just one big page.
	* email or cgi updating of news items.

Anyway, you could probably write better tools for the job yourself!

> These pages are one of the coolest things of the net.

Thanks for the compliment! I've already passed them along to the rfk-dev
list.

Yours,
Peter

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