Visiting Sunol

[chipotle]

As I start this, I’m in a small town—no, a really small town—called Sunol. I gather the name is mostly heard in traffic reports thanks to a section of I-680 called the Sunol Grade, but what’s fascinating here isn’t traffic patterns—it’s that this feels like an isolated, rural town much farther away from the metro area than it is. Looking out the window of the Sunol Coffee House—an old building itself—I can see a tiny post office, two other buildings and a railway. Farther down main street in either direction are, well, maybe three more buildings.

Yes, this’ll probably be a little bit of a long lunch. I don’t feel guilty because this is a time when much of the rest of the department is out seeing “Meet the Fockers” as a group movie. If they’d been able to stick with their first choice of “House of Flying Daggers,” I’d have gone with them.

But I like finding places like this, and I’m reminded that when I was at There I found the East Bay Regional Parks web site and realized that district is just really honking big. I decided I wanted to go around visiting a few of those parks, but for the most part, I haven’t. Not that I can change that today—there are two nearby parks and I suspect I’ll give one a quick look, but it’s not going to be that long a lunch.

Naturally, my thoughts are on… templating systems. In addition to poking around a myriad of Python systems, I’ve come across the up-and-coming Ruby on Rails application framework (written as some might guess in the Ruby language), which is supposed to be great for what’s amusingly been dubbed “CRUD” applications: “Create / Read / Update / Delete,” the basic database operations. It’s certainly possible to write blogging/CMS software in such a framework, although it occurs to me that where it’d be really useful is… well, the application I’m working on for work. But they’re pretty firmly wedded to Perl where I am, so I’d need to find the Perl equivalent. (I’m also a little allergic to the constant drumbeat in the RoR community for a Mac text editor called TextMate, but that’s another issue.)

The annoying thing is the voice in my the back of my head saying: what would a content management system be like that didn’t have any templates? How could one be designed that’s still flexible and customizable that doesn’t use a template? The ideas that are bouncing around in my mind right now are for things that one might argue are still effectively templates, but I’m thinking of something that’s easier to manage and set up than the “XHTML with placeholders” approach.

Comments

[dour.livejournal.com]

Just for the record, if you're within range of a movie theater that has two different movies then you ain't in no small town, slicker. ;>

[dour.livejournal.com]

Oh. Also, having seen both, I am sad to inform you that Meet The Fockers is by far the better movie. :P

Ruby on Rails not just for OSX

[(Anonymous)]

Ruby on Rails is not just for the Mac crowd. I, and many others, very successfully use it on Windows. I'm sure there are some Linux developers, too. :-)

Curt Hibbs

Re: Ruby on Rails not just for OSX

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Sorry, I might have been fuzzy in my phrasing -- I just meant that the TextMate editor is for OS X, not Rails. I know Ruby's pretty cross-platform. (And I'd probably be looking at it for the project at work if I could, but they're extremely Perl-centric. I did find a framework called Maypole which seems to have some of the Rails' "code as little as possible and don't repeat yourself" philosophy.)

[shockwave77598.livejournal.com]

XML can be thought of as just that kind of structure. Or create something like this:

[Error: Irreparable invalid markup ('<col=first>') in entry. Owner must fix manually. Raw contents below.]

XML can be thought of as just that kind of structure. Or create something like this:

<begin><COL=FIRST>Allen<COL=LAST>Kitchen<COL=DOB>11/29/63<end>

You could get the data in any order and it would make sense.

[chipotle.livejournal.com]

Well, actually, that's what I'm thinking about avoiding. :) This isn't anything against XML; I'm pretty familiar with it. (I actually keep my resume in an XML document and have three XSLT sheets and a Makefile that output it in HTML, RTF and plain text.) Textpattern's templates are XML, too--basically, they're XHTML documents, with Textpattern-specific markup as tags in the txp: namespace (so <txp:article_list limit="5" /> might display the five most recent articles). It's an elegant system, producing templates which are not only readable but which any XML-aware editor does The Right Thing with.

I suppose I'm considering how to do something that's as markup-free as possible, mostly to see if anything new can be learned by doing a bit of trailblazing. Sometimes you find great things that other people didn't think of because they're all following in each other's footsteps, and sometimes you find that there's a good reason everyone is doing things the same way. (My quests for great word processors show both of those--some word processors do a few things differently than Microsoft Word and really innovate, and some do things differently than Word and make things unnecessarily complex and inflexible.)