I just finished my first site of my second bout of freelancism. Certa Solutions went live about half an hour ago. I didn’t do the design, BTW, just the build.

Building the site I fell into the same patterns that I often do when building straight HTML. The effort of maintaining consistency between 40+ pages outweighs everything else. To this end I’ve thought about converting all the content to XML and then building a set of XSL transformations to generate the site. Then the computer can do the repetive bit! Ha! The trick would then be to balance the content out between nodes - much easier than distributing it around one document.

I may try to rebuild Certa using this technique, but more likely I think I’ll leave it until next time I have to do something similar. Hypothetical is a priority, and Fog needs a page which means rebuilding this site.

Also today I joined the Smarty mailing list and found out that my problems with it are not due to it, but my PHP build. Installing it on a more predictable BSD machine (this one) worked fine. Smarty is a template engine, the PHP teams measures to seperate logic from design. It’s pretty fast, although I don’t have the numbers for other systems like Zope or JSP. I’m going to use it to provide theme support for Hype2.