Scott Ventura's Site Generator

Motivation

I found myself wishing for a free piece of software that would let me have a consistent look and feel to my web site without a lot of cutting and pasting. When I originally did my site in WordPerfect Internet Publisher, I didn't mind the cutting and pasting so much, but it still felt like an inefficient way to accomplish what I wanted.

Microsoft FrontPage provided the functionality I was looking for coupled with a seductively simple WYSIWYG editor. Unfortunately, FrontPage isn't cheap, and it's much simpler to use if the server is running special Microsoft extensions to the server software. Most server administrators aren't happy about installing extra software on important multi-user machines, and I can't blame them.

Solution

In the beginning of the summer of 1997, I followed up on a vision I'd had several months earlier: Use the C preprocessor to insert files in the middle of other files. I played with gpp for a bit until I came up with a set of command-line options that worked, then wrote a makefile to automatically run the command for specified files.

Guess what! It worked. My HTML source is now split into header files and content files. The header files contain the HTML source for the graphics, the navigation links, the boilerplate at the bottom, and even a few other things. The content files have the text that makes each page unique, with a few references to the header files.

Reasons I Use It

It has an interface only a programmer could love.
I can edit my source in emacs, and we all know there's nothing I love as much as emacs.
All of the software it relies on is freely available to anyone running just about any flavor of UNIX.
All of the software it relies on is available on the machine I keep my site on.
I don't have to trust somebody else's application's HTML generator. I write all of the HTML (even if it is in separate files) so I know exactly what the browser gets when it goes to display the page.
I've got a lot of pages on this site. I'd hate to have to do copy and paste into each of them every time I want to change one of the common design features of my site.
It will never be outdated by new versions of HTML because it has no concept of HTML.

Features

Automatically #defines the name of the .c file being compiled, substituting underscores for periods and hyphens as necessary.
Makes content editting easier because anything in a separate file stays out of the way.
Automatically replaces the word FILE with the name of the html file being generated.
Provides a nice middle-ground between hand-coding and full automation.
Processing power is only needed at generation time, not every time the page is requested, like server-side includes.
#defines CDATE, which is an integer representation of the date in the form YYMMDD. #if can handle comparison operators to compare CDATE to specific dates. This allows content to change according to the date of site generation. Utilities like cron and at can be used to automatically generate the site right after a date change.
#defines CTIME, which is an integer representation of the time of day in the form HHMMSS. #if can be used to have content only appear when the page is generated at certain times of day.
Uses grep to remove blank lines from the final product. Selective compilation normally produces a very large number of blank lines, which we circumvent here. (Not everyone will consider this a "feature", but that's ok.)

Flaws

.h files can't have single quotes in them because the preprocessor tries to find a terminating single quote to make a character constant. This is taken care of in the .c files by running sed on the .c file first. I have yet to figure out a good way to do this except to create a rule to go from .hp to .h or somesuch. That will mess things up quite a bit.
Previewing is a bit of a hassle: you have to generate the HTML files before you can see the final result. If you understand HTML, this probably won't be a big problem, but it does slow the development cycle slightly.

Acquisition

I used to offer to send the site generator out to anyone who wanted it. I've since decided that nobody should go through the anguish of using it other than myself. My poor choice of macro languages is certainly one of the factors. Sorry!

On the bright side, there is now a program that will do the job, has many more features, and is a Perl program (woo hoo!) distributed under the GPL (woo hoo!). This program is GTML, available at http://www.lifl.fr/~beaufils/gtml/. Enjoy!

This page was lovingly hand-crafted by Scott Ventura, who is solely responsible for the contents. Scott is also the sole owner of the content of this page, including all of the graphics. Send comments or questions.

URL: http://FeedMyEgo.com/sitegen.html