http://www.catmosearts.co.uk was launched today, it’s the web site I’ve been working on for a long while at work (alongside my other work) and promotes the Theatre and Gallery.
Events
This is the clever bit which I’ve described here before I think. A calendar application which uses the iCalendar specification and supports WebDAV is used to add an event. The calendar is published to the web server where it is stored as a .ics file. On the web site the .ics file is then parsed by a hacked version of the phpicalendar parser and a section of it is turned into an RSS feed of sorts, which is then used by some functions I’ve written in conjunction with magpierss to generate the final web pages based on templates. It all amounts to a web site whose content is managed using a simple calendar application on someone’s (hopefully not my) desktop.
Directory
This is a simple MySQL database of local arists and arts groups.
Standards
The site is XHTML and CSS validated. The only minor thing I haven’t done yet is write a text only version of the front page, because (usefully) that’s really the only bit which doesn’t transform gracefully into text only.
In other news…
I got 10 Ubuntu CDs through the post yesterday (mixture of x86, AMD64 and PowerPC), and I’m very impressed with Hoary. I did try and do a day’s work using the Live CD on the eMac I use at work, but I soon ran out of RAM 😛 I especially like the simple view of the Synaptic Package Manager and the “Search for files” functionality but there’s a lot more going for it than that.
I’ve ordered a Dual 2.8 Xeon (yes, 64 bit) Dell rack mounted server at work to be my new testing web server with 1Gb of RAM. Mmmmm. As sarge is now finally frozen I think I’ll stick that on it, but I’m still very tempted to try out Ubuntu on a server platform. We’re rackmounting *everything* in the server room this summer (so there’ll be Windows, Mac and GNU/Linux servers all in the same rack), hope they get along OK, especially as they will all be sharing a 12-way KVM switch for when VNC breaks 😀