The Project That Ate My Brain
Nov. 6th, 2002 09:53 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
shannon_aThis is the project that was eating my brain late last week:
I'm not sure if it looks like much from the photograph, but it's a simple content management program. It's called "My Skotos", after the gaming company I wrote it for.
In the "My Skotos" content management system, you can define a number of different pages--those are the white and gray tabs near the top of the page. And for each page you can define a number of panels--those are marked by the black strips in the main page and words like "Hegemony Forums" and "Hegemony Latest Game". Each panel contains some information--info on a recent strategy game; listings of recent forums messages; news of reviews of a specific game; whatever. Those panels and pages can all be dynamically moved about in a variety of ways. Panels can go up and down, pages can go right and left, etc. If you look closely you can see some mostly invisible black buttons with white text on them which show either arrows or X's--that's what does the movement (you can actually do it from a pop-up window with nice JavaScript too).
There are 34 panels in the system right now. Some are really simple "include" files from other parts of our web site while others link into our games or our forum system in some very different ways. It's quite easy to define new panels, and I've actually got a long list of them that I'd like to do as time allows.
Also for each page, you get to define navbars for the lefthand column (again, drawn from our general site), and you can choose names and backgrounds.
Overall, the whole system lets you pick and choose content from a site (in this case, www.skotos.net in an arbitrary way that matches what interests you. It's the type of thing that I think the Internet does great.
I'm extremely proud of the system. It's built in a UNIX-based programming language called Perl, and hopefully pretty good Perl code too. I've carefully abstracted and boxed off everything which should make it easy to update the code, add new systems, or even use some of my systems in other projects.
It's also the first major, original programming project that I've done since college. And that's very exciting because Berkeley had totally burned out any interest I had in computer programming.
Programming projects like this, especially when they're live on the Internet, are never done. But, the code is stable and complete enough that I don't feel the need to futz with it right now. Well, except maybe to add new panels when I have a few spare moments.
Next up, I plan to write a blogging system to give our players the chance to write Journals, like these here, and to share them with the members of their community, which is to say Skotos. It's going to be built from scratch, just like my content management system, although I can already see that I'm going to get to reuse some of my content code.
Desiging the blog system, and hopefully beginning on the engineering, starts on Friday.
I'm not sure if it looks like much from the photograph, but it's a simple content management program. It's called "My Skotos", after the gaming company I wrote it for.
In the "My Skotos" content management system, you can define a number of different pages--those are the white and gray tabs near the top of the page. And for each page you can define a number of panels--those are marked by the black strips in the main page and words like "Hegemony Forums" and "Hegemony Latest Game". Each panel contains some information--info on a recent strategy game; listings of recent forums messages; news of reviews of a specific game; whatever. Those panels and pages can all be dynamically moved about in a variety of ways. Panels can go up and down, pages can go right and left, etc. If you look closely you can see some mostly invisible black buttons with white text on them which show either arrows or X's--that's what does the movement (you can actually do it from a pop-up window with nice JavaScript too).
There are 34 panels in the system right now. Some are really simple "include" files from other parts of our web site while others link into our games or our forum system in some very different ways. It's quite easy to define new panels, and I've actually got a long list of them that I'd like to do as time allows.
Also for each page, you get to define navbars for the lefthand column (again, drawn from our general site), and you can choose names and backgrounds.
Overall, the whole system lets you pick and choose content from a site (in this case, www.skotos.net in an arbitrary way that matches what interests you. It's the type of thing that I think the Internet does great.
I'm extremely proud of the system. It's built in a UNIX-based programming language called Perl, and hopefully pretty good Perl code too. I've carefully abstracted and boxed off everything which should make it easy to update the code, add new systems, or even use some of my systems in other projects.
It's also the first major, original programming project that I've done since college. And that's very exciting because Berkeley had totally burned out any interest I had in computer programming.
Programming projects like this, especially when they're live on the Internet, are never done. But, the code is stable and complete enough that I don't feel the need to futz with it right now. Well, except maybe to add new panels when I have a few spare moments.
Next up, I plan to write a blogging system to give our players the chance to write Journals, like these here, and to share them with the members of their community, which is to say Skotos. It's going to be built from scratch, just like my content management system, although I can already see that I'm going to get to reuse some of my content code.
Desiging the blog system, and hopefully beginning on the engineering, starts on Friday.
