Somehow when I started this project I didn’t think I would be doing as much web development as I have been doing. It’s my nature, though. I am highly process oriented. If I have to do something multiple times I want to put in the work to make things go as efficiently as possible. It’s why, in my shop, I often find myself spending more time making the tooling and fixturing to get a job done than it takes to actually do the job. I get satisfaction in having things go smoothly and efficiently. Few things frustrate me more than having to repeatedly do something in an inefficient manner just to “get it done”.
When I started working on this site, I decided it would be a small modification to the site I had already developed for myself http://site.teryk.com. As it turns out I ended up making a bunch of changes to add to it’s readability and maintainability. It’s hard to see the changes as my own site has kept pace. In reality they are both served from the same WordPress instance and it serves out ironpunk.org or teryk.com based on the URL it is reached by. Eventually my hope is that the IronPunk site will need to scale up to it’s own server but for now this is the cheap solution. It isn’t the fastest server but it will have to do for now.
The latest addition to the site is the dynamically generated tables that display the IronPunk parts list and the list of Online Resource Links. The nice thing about the way these are implemented is that it allows the user to interact with the data and, because of the way that the data is stored, it can be reused in different ways and maintained easily. I won’t bore you with the details in this post. If you are interested however, you can check out this post over in the Details section. I’ve used a lot of opensource code in creating this site and that post gives credit where credit is due.