May 28, 2006 15:35 | WebTech

Announcing RaSP!

RaSP

Hah, that sounds so official like.

Back when I was a... oh wait I still am a freelancing web specialist... anyways, I built this "rapid site prototyper" in PHP. It's based on an array which one sets up to mimic one's site directory architecture (it basically provides metadata for stuff like directory label, visibility, has children, etc, and is quicker than to read an entire site's directory structure from disk on every page load). It worked well enough that once a site was done prototyping, there was no reason to not run the site off the same system. Content management was as simple as FTP'ing into the server and editing the file you wanted to edit. hehehe

It's built with all kinds of preconceived notions and ideals and hopes and dreams and dammit it's gone through 4 or 5 from-scratch rewrites, and at one time was all I could think about for weeks at a time. One particularly dreamy sunday afternoon I remember being deep in thought about how having this backbone informs the rest of the site of each of it's nodes existence and place and such and thought "eureka! that's it! the solution to all of man's problems is awareness!"

Ahem.

Anyways. The codebase has laid pretty much dormant for years now. I've recently used it as the corkboard on which sites such as the IMD, Mimi Ito's and Kula/ecto/endo are pinned up on, integrating them with Movable Type generated/maintained content output.

There are actually a dozen other one-off brochure-ware sites out there running on this code. Good stuff, I could build a site in 10 minutes, go over the prototype with the client one or two times, then skin it and deliver. This was before the days of the fancy FOSS CMS systems eh... Also I gave the code to one good friend of mine and it allowed him to feed, clothe and house himself VERY well for almost 2 years... ;)

Anyways, I'm pulling it out again today. My code-fu is of course much better now and I have some new needs for it so I need to recode it somewhat. So I thought I'd give it a new name: RaSP. Not terribly original but its namesake, the wood rasp, seems an appropriate metaphor for how one works with it to gradually file down to a site architecture that fits the client's needs...

Anyways, nothing to see here, move along.

Maybe I'll share it... maybe I won't, we'll see. ;)

Comments

Hehe...!


Dude, don't release the spaghetti, please ;)


Yeah I know I know, it's terrible. But it does what it's supposed to and if I can clean it up... ;)