Posted by nix on November 21, 2013, at 5:36:25
Hi Dr. Bob, et al!
I came for psych advice; and I got it. Thank you.
Stayed because I think this site is from a technical standpoint really quite awesome.
I'm not at all being sarcastic. If you'll allow me to explain, there is also a particular point (eventually) to why I raise this in the first place.
I'm not 100% sure on the following points; and if you felt like chiming in at any point Dr. Bob or anyone else familiar to confirm/deny/clarify that would be great; but I'd understand if you wouldn't want to (or even felt the need to delete this post) if you think it would be a security issue. (I won't be going into anything about the user registration system or anything I myself think could be vulnerable, but nonetheless).
- Despite the core WWWBoard script this site was based on now being old enough to vote, Dr. Bob has been able to maintain it all the while, and add a number of features to boot. It is also not slow.
It is not slow because:
- This entire site is almost entirely static; there is not really much of a 'server' in any sense one might think of one with respect to today's modern web applications. There are web pages, a handful of forms, and a few scripts that live on the web server. There are no bulky SQL databases; mysterious AJAX transmissions, or heavy server-side applications. (If the tone above is not clear, these are all *good* things.)
- The site 'updates' only when someone submit's a form (and at I think some regular intervals, maybe with a couple of chron scripts or something, i.e. to archive each months' posts. Or maybe this is done manually?
- When someone posts, it triggers a tiny script on the server, which writes out a new HTML page for that post; updates all the pages in that thread with a link to the new post; and updates the index page for the respective forum.
More of less, that's just about it.Why do I bring this up?
Because precisely this type of easy, fast, simple, static web design is once again considered to be some of the latest and greatest methodologies in web design. Stuff like:http://www.angularjs.org
http://jekyllrb.comAny everything listed at:
http://modernstatic.comThere are umpteen new blog engines now written this way.
(Contrast something like WordPress, which requires a full Apache-MySQL-PHP server setup.)But there are no forum-type software platforms that are (to my knowledge).
Instead, even the websites for these new static engines, if they have any type of community feature at all, plug in a big and clunky forum engine.
See:
http://forum.middlemanapp.com.The link above is Discourse (http://www.discourse.org). It is considered maybe one of the newer, and most lightweight of these.
But it still requires Ruby of Rails and a PostgresSQL server.So anyway, congratulations on being at the forefront of web technology ;). I think I might take a crack at trying to write a simple engine like this one on top of Jekyll (and yes, just use a simple POST-based web form to update). I think I get most of the idea of how it works from the original wwwboard script; but unfortunately http://www.getscript.com/wwwboard (mentioned in the FAQ) does not seem to to exist any longer. So if you ever felt comfortable throwing some of the neat customizations youve added to the Perl scripts up on Github or something, that, um, would be neat. (Although again, I understand why you might prefer not to.)
Best.
G
poster:nix
thread:1054711
URL: http://www.dr-bob.org/babble/admin/20130903/msgs/1054711.html