After a week of beavering away with JSP, HTML and CSS, I reckon my project website is about ready.
I was in Manchester on Tuesday, meeting my project supervisor and one of the guys who runs the taught module associated with the project. There don’t seem to be any problems, and it helped to clarify some of the vagueness I referred to previously.
So, the website content needed to include a statement of the project aims and objectives, a summary of the progress to date, the project plan (significantly cut down from the previous detailed exposition) and a summary of the literature search so far – bringing together what I’d already done, about a week’s work so far. I also decided to take a middle road between the simplistic html-in-a-zip approach and an all-singing-all-dancing one. I’m not going to get any more marks for going nuts on this thing, so I just took the aspects that mitigate risks or save time – for example, using a custom tag library to template out the elements that would otherwise need to be duplicated, thus saving time especially when they needed to be changed. I also decided not to compromise on the HTML/CSS separation, again in the interests of making changes to stylistic aspects as simple as possible.
All three elements of the project to date save data in a text-based format: the summary is written in LaTeX; the plan saves an XML document; and the website of course is a structure made up of HTML, CSS and JSP files. This means that all three play nicely with a version control system, and I decided to give Git a whirl at the outset. In a nutshell, I’ve been making small changes, then storing those changes along with messages as part of a ‘commit’ process. These messages can be extracted, providing a kind of timeline of what I’ve been doing for the past few weeks much better than I would have done in my own notes. I can take those timestamped messages and push them into the website during the build process, then use a simple renderer to print them out on the site when certain links are clicked. Seemed like a good way to augment the ‘summary to date’ deliverable.
I’ve also spent a few hours updating and tidying up this blog as I’ve linked appropriate posts into the site as another way of tracking progress and my hosting provider took it down over the weekend, as well as a nasty surprise with my original EC2 instance… maybe good for another post.
crossedstreams.com 