Free for all

ReSiStance

I've been threatening to write something that might actually help someone one day, so here we are.

Hmm, ever noticed how the mind becomes stimulated during windy weather (maybe it's just a phenomenon localised to my mind alone). The mind is like an arab stallion and needs to be kept under control at all times but without breaking its spirit, or else you'll end up teaching comparative criticism (or similar) at the Moody Institute (or similar).

OK, digressions out of the way, we may now commence

At any time, being torn in three of four different directions, pulled apart by arab stallions as it were, by the four major interests in my life, family and friends, web design/development(yes I still run Tweed Web Design), music, and (of course) my spiritual endeavors, leaves me little time these days for working on freebies. Maybe I should include my blogs in there as a fifth element?

Molasses

So the other day when speaking with some ladies at a local real estate business shopfront, I mentioned about putting molasses on the doorbell to keep guests away (don't ask how we got there, you wouldn't believe the wandering conversations I have ... or would you?).

The ladies looked at me aghast, as if to say "How impersonal!". Actually, my friends know that I am usually a busy boy and telephone to see what I am up to rather that just arrive unannounced, and they expect the same of me. One friend who lives thousands of miles away even emails me to arrange a time to telephone (now that's courtesy). So people showing up at the door unannounced often means someone wanting assistance with some "computer" problem which could be anything from somewhere to send an email to a 99 year project.

I'd best get that jar of molasses.

Free Bees

Nevertheless, I still seem to get caught up in freebies. One I have at the moment is a labour of love for my Srila Gurudeva ... "Would that be Ananda Samvada?", I hear you ask. Yes, glad you recognised my work there :^). The other is a site that kind of "just happened" when I suggested to a musician friend that a few pages on the web would be useful to him and offered to knock up something for him.

Well of course, if you've ever worked with musos, you'll know that they have their own (archaic) ideas of design and not only that, their own idea of what's going to be required. The word anachronism cannot be used here, being too much of an understatement, but of course, many people, especially musos I guess, tend to believe the web of the 90s is still in full swing. So-o-o, very soon the few pages had become a multi-topic site including a CMS and e-commerce shopping cart.

Luckily, my friend knows a guy in jolly olde England who is expert at creating web apps. So after putting together the wire frame for the site, my friend delivered it to to his friend all ready to be "edited".

These things take time

Like, 9 months later it hasn't happened, although I believe that it's nearly finished. Dave, my friend's friend is very good at what he does and therefore extremely busy, so it's gonna be a while I guess.

To the RSScue

Nevertheless, thinking of a quick, painless way of providing a temporary CMS solution for the site I figured that if we set up a blog(s) with an RSS feed out, we could then use the resultant feed(s) to populate the content of the web pages. OK easy peasey, works fine. Didn't take long at all to set up a functional test. Using the much maligned blogger as the blog, exported an RSS feed with FeedBurner which works great with Blogger for "some unknown reason". The only thing left to do was to convert the XML of the RSS into xHTML.

There are plenty of solutions available to do this although I don't recommend the JavaScript version(s) due to the fact that all the search engines get to feed on is a small block of JavaScript, whereas the PHP converters make the content available to the search engines. I used SimplePie, which worked fine in one browser but needed a little editing of the slightly daunting 5000 line library to get rid of an error message in another browser. Don't worry, the error message tells you which line needs to be edited, line 1117, from memory although I could be wrong, it happened a few weeks ago.

Testing

Haven't tested it extensively as yet although it's apparently running fine on the weblog page of the Murwillumbah Community Centre, a not for profit organisation where I volunteer after they accidentally wrecked the site my friend David Smith made for them via Job Futures, before David was killed in a motor accident. The biggest problem I'll have at the MCC is to get someone to actually use the site for anything.

Thus when I get time I shall incorporate the "RSS CMS" into my friend's site at Sacred Geometry. Sacred Geometry needs heaps of editing but eventually it will be a fine site. Lord knows how long it will be before any editing or RSSing happens at Sacred Geometry, since I just got sent a whole stack of work from my brother in Ireland who is the editor of Ananda Samvada (the other freebie mentioned above, and God gets priority)... he's the editor (my brother, not God), I'm the publisher, we work pretty well together (my brother and me, not God and me), although he/He might get a bit worried when the redesign of the site starts happening as it will pretty soon since the Ananda Samvada site is looking pretty archaeic itself.

After working on a redesign of Murwillumbah Community Centre I am sure that I might have opted for a new site at the very beginning. Working with old fashioned table structure is so not me. Next step for the MCC IS a new site, but fixing up the old one took just as much work.

Who wants a freebie then?

So, I'll let you all know when I have some spare time and then I'll be available to do some freebies. Till then unless you like being blue, don't hold yer breath.

Joy to all beings
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terrence