I was persuaded by my friend Gary to take over the webmaster position for his dive club. I can't dive myself, except into a swimming pool, but Gary can be quite persuasive and seeing as Gary is president this year and the previous webmaster was having serious health problems I just sort of fell into it. The site is www.wssc.ca and is centuries old in web years. My plan has been to make the fewest possible changes without being lynched. It is a simple static site that is hosted for free by Kelcom, so any server side automation is out of the question.

Naturally, the plan failed as I started tinkering. I managed to refactor the underlying html so instead of being spread over a tangle of deeply nested directories, it now resides all in the root directory --- grep and sed were my refactoring tools of choice and they worked admirably. Out went all the table based formatting to be replaced by a globally linked css file, and out went at least twenty unreachable pages. A large number of duplicate paraphenalia were collected together, and a few file names regularized to maintain karmic balance. The source directories actually look quite managable now, less ponderous.

The curious thing is --- to the browser it still looks exactly the same as before, and I've run out of enthusiasm for making any more changes. The photo gallery stopped me dead. Maintaining a photo gallery on a static site is not a pretty thing. There are a vast number of tools that have been developed to make this easier, but I've always hated graphical word-processor-style editors and I can't afford them besides (in MHz not $ --- my machine is 6 years old --- though it's odd, a 1985 Mac could have done the job easily). If server side solutions hadn't come along and marginalized static content creation tools I probably wouldn't be considering what I am --- writing a custom perl script to scan a directory hierarchy and create the thumbnails and static pages all cross-linked and nice. How quaint.

I did add one miniscule innovation. A bit of AJAX code to test for the existence of the monthly (and predictably named) newletter pdf files on the server, and blanking out those not yet available. Now the newsletter editor can ftp upload the files without bothering me until the end of the year, by which time another schmuck will have my job --- oh joy, oh bliss. It hits the server with a dozen HEAD requests each time the page is loaded, but its not my server. I'm quite pleased with it seeing as until this morning I hadn't written a line of javascript. My HELLO WORLD coding in javascript might actually save me some work.

p>Alas, horrible javascripted pop-ups litter the site. The members seem to actually like these things. I know that to be the result of using a hopelessly out-of-date browser; with a reasonable tabbed browser they are just annoying.