James Gottlieb

May 312012
 

I’ve made some good progress on the OokOok project over the last week. The system has a minimal page management interface now, so you can create, edit, and delete new pages and place them in the project’s sitemap. You can create project editions that freeze the content in time, and you can see the different versions of a page using time-based URLs.

You know you have a real software project when you have a list of things that won’t be in the current version. So it is with OokOok. Eventually, I want to support any dynamic web-based digital humanities project and allow it to run forever without any project-specific maintenance. For now, I’ll be happy creating a simple text content management system that has all the time-oriented features. We can add support for algorithms later.

Today, I want to talk a bit about the model I’m using to keep track of the different versions and the impact this has on the user interface.

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May 242012
 

Perl

Perl (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I’m using part of my research time to dive back into a development thread I’ve been working on for the last decade. It started with the various Gestinanna packages through 2004 that are now on BackPAN, the archive of CPAN modules no longer considered actively distributed. I followed it a few years later with a set of Ruby fabulator gems that are in my github repository. I designed these to run in Radiant, a nice CMS for small teams. I used the Ruby/Radiant system to teach a course at DHSI in 2011 covering data acquisition, management, and presentation.

Now, I’m combining my experience and starting a new coding effort. I’ll be posting code to github.com/jgsmith/perl-ookook/. There are a lot of design decisions that I hope to discuss in a series of blog posts. For example, why did I choose Perl over something new and shiny like Ruby or Node.js? Why didn’t I use a venerable environment like Java and the JVM? Why have a backend SQL database instead of a noSQL database. For now, I’ll try to discuss a few questions that have shorter answers.

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