How I Create These Pages

This entire web site is created from a database. The pages are not created dynamically for each HTTP request, rather a program generates the static pages that you are currently reading from information it has in a database. This document describes how this is done.

The technology used in the creation of this site is just about all freely available on the Internet, and just goes to show what can be done without paying vast amounts of money for commercial software. (Note: I only tend to use free software that compiles straight out of the tar(1) file with little or no configuration on my Solris 2.X machine.)

Software Used...

• Database: PostgreSQL
  PostgreSQL gives me powerfull database technology that easily interfaces to my programming language of choice.
• Programming Language: Python
  Python is my programming language of choice, and has been for a number of years now.
• Graphic Tools: ImageMagick & The Gimp
  I use The Gimp to create the original graphics, and I then transform them down to GIFs using ImageMagick. I also use ImageMagick to manipulate the high resolution scanned pictures in TIFF format down to the various sizes of JPEG image used on the site.

The Program...

The program that performs the generation of the site uses two non standard Python modules. Firstly there is pg95ext which gives me a simple to use interface to making SQL queries on the PostgreSQL database. Secondly I use the HTMLgen module to generate the HTML without having to mess about with raw HTML tags.

A minimal example of what can be achived using Python and these two modules is shown below:

  import pg95ext
  from HTMLgen import *

  db = pg95ext.connect (dbname="collection")

  manufacturers = db.query ("SELECT full_name,common_name,resource "
                            "FROM manufacturer")

  for (full_name,common_name,resource) in manufacturers:

    doc = MinimalDocument ()
    doc.title = "Manufacturer - %s"%(full_name)

    doc.append (Heading(1,common_name))

    # Other HTML goes here...

    doc.write (filename = resource+".html")
    
  db.close ()
      

You can find the full source code of the program that creates these pages in: generate_collection

Static Pages...

Even these 'static' pages are partly stored in the database. The main body of the page is stored in a plain text file as it allows me to edit it using my favourite editor. I then store a reference to this file in the database along with title, description, keywords etc. I can then bolt on my standard headers and footers to the pages to give then a consistent appearance without the headache of keeping them up to date all the time.

The Database...

Someday I will get around to publishing the database schema, but for the time being let me say...

There is more information stored in the database than is presented in these web pages. Things that have been left out are who/where I acquire things from, and their purchase price. This is to save embarrassment for me How much did you spend on that machine! and to protect my sources because I wouldn't want to give these away to other collectors and increase competition :-)

My Pictures...

I don't use anybody elses pictures, so all the pictures you will find on this site were taken by me. (Yes, I am no expert at photography but I am learning slowly.) I scanned the original prints into high resolution 24bit TIFF files. These 'originals' are then converted using ImageMagick into various size JPEG files, and it is these pictures you see here on the site.