Static vs. Dynamic
I’ve been waffling back and forth about how I want to implement my Dad’s website. Should I create a content-management system that spits out static HTML files, or should I create a dynamic system? I’m an application developer by trade, so my first instinct is the latter. But creating a dynamic system would tie me to a particular scripting language on the site host. I would be most comfortable using Java and JSP, but as I’ve mentioned before, that’s harder to find in a hosting environment. PHP could be a good option, but even then, you usually have to pay more for that option.
While reading white space today, I came across this article about static vs. dynamic files. Reading it, and especially reading all the comments, I think I’ve come to a decision. As a comment posted by Gabriel Mihalache said, dynamic pages are for dynamic content. And the content on my Dad’s site is not dynamic. I still don’t want to code each page by hand, so I’ll write a content management system to generate the files from a set of HTML templates. I’d been thinking about this earlier, and I think it’s probably the way to go. The CMS can be anything, but I’ll probably have it as a web application, maybe residing on my home computer.
So, I think my plan of action is this:
- Create HTML templates
- Perfect CSS styling
- Write functionality for storing data about paintings & images
- Write functionality for creating pages from templates using the data entered with the functionality from the last step
- (Optional) Write functionality for uploading generated content to a host using FTP