About freeism.orgFreeism.org is just a place where I put all my ideas and theories. I call it "the only place on the internet for nothing but the whole truth". Kind of like a shorter version of "the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth". Except that I'm actually doing it instead of pretending to do it, like most people do. At least when you push them hard enough to talk about "answer to life" kind of questions. Who am I though... Oh, just some guy. You could check my videos to see what I look like, but it doesn't matter who I am really. I'm not sure I really enjoy people wanting to know who I am without actually wanting to understand my ideas. That just seems wrong. All that matters are the ideas. And the ideas are brilliant. Oh, anyhow, about freeism.org! So yeah, how does the website work? Well! It's written in php, by me. (I'm a software developer...). About 90% of my php code is about linking and navigation. It tries to be the most intelligent about how it links stuff and understands the source content. It reads data out of .page files! Those are just plain text, but it can contain xml if I want. At the very least the plain text needs to be XML valid when wrapped in a <tag></tag> (or else it complains bitterly). Then it processes the plain text in there, looking for words it recognises, and linking them up if it can find them. The list of words to be recognised actually comes from scanning the entire file system for .page files. Well not the entire file system, just... sensible parts of it. It also does loads of other stuff like making paragraphs look nice (not easy), processing a special <diagram> tag I made up to make it easy for me to add diagrams to the website, and generating navigation bars and all that. I don't have to bother knowing the entire URL to a picture, I just type the picture name (ending with .png) in a text like this "{blabla.png}" and it finds that file no matter what folder it's in! And then you see the picture! Even things like NOT linking to a page we are currently at (and doing it in a reliable way), takes some sophisticated intelligence. Its got other features too. But I won't go into them, they are all around linking anyhow. Basically it's a super auto-link and navigation generating engine, that makes MY LIFE easy when adding content. Meaning I can just merrily type away in plain text, not manually add a single link, and just know that its all automatically fully linked, and everything adds up and makes sense and looks clean and simple and professional. I can use directories to organise my (will be) massive amount of content. Well, even if I only had a little content I still want a simple way to organise it :P and directories are the simplest way. The directories are used for the navigational structure you see on the side of the pages. If I rename or move a .page file, guess what? It all still works. I don't get broken links, because they are all regenerated. If I add a .page file later, I can be sure that any existing old content that used that file's name will be linked to it. So adding bla.page means any articles containing the word "bla" get linked to the new page. Thats the beauty of the system, it makes my life easy. Oh, it auto-caches too, using PHP sessions to do the caching. I couldn't be bothered to write to a text file as sessions were simpler. I just share one session across the users. This means my website runs FAST. |
Last modified: Monday 19/10/2009 11:42
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