Colin's Journal

Colin's Journal: A place for thoughts about politics, software, and daily life.

June 15th, 2003

Another note

On a completely separate note from the wonderful world of web pages, we have mini-poppadums, bought during this weekends “taste of little Italy”. They are pretty tasty, and indeed very small.

The “taste of little Italy” is tiny compared to “the taste of the Danforth” and involved a lot less food. There were a comparatively larger number of bands playing, including Jazz, a Brazilian drumming/dancing group, and yes even someone singing in Italian.

Overall a fun way to spend a Saturday afternoon.

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June 15th, 2003

PubTal released!

Dinner was good, so it’s time to let the world know about PubTal, my latest creation. I’ve been using a fair mixture of different ways to keep my web pages up-to date over the years, from straight HTML pages through to XML transformations using XSLT.

I had hoped that XSLT would become the way for me to manage all my site, but it turned out that both writing the templates and more importantly the content, was too error prone and painful.

A few weeks back I decided to have another go at solving the problem of managing this site, and came up with PubTal. The content for PubTal is written in plain text with minimal HTML markup, which makes editing and creating pages extremely easy. I can even use the spell checker that comes with my text editor, because the content is mostly just plain text.

Templates for PubTal are written in TAL (hence the name) which I find far easier to understand and use than XSLT. XSLT can do a lot more, that’s most of the problem, but for a small site like this you don’t need much from a templating system, and TAL gives all the power you do need.

If you maintain your own web pages then please take the time to have a look at PubTal. It’s not going to be for everyone, but it’s made my web maintenance easier, and so it should be useful to others as well.

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Copyright 2015 Colin Stewart

Email: colin at owlfish.com