Just a Few Small Technicalities

How is This Done?

You may be curious about how this web site is created and maintained. If so, please read on and you will find out a little bit about the nuts and bolts that hold Lynn Park Place together. I'm not going to be extremely technical in my description because that would defeat the purpose of my writing this page. What? Oh! My purpose it to tell you, in non-technical language, about some of the technical challenges that web creators and proprietors think about, or should.

One of the things I do at work when I'm a content and document consultant is design publishing systems like this one. It may not have ocurred to you explicitly to think of a web site as a publishing system, but it is. Once you give it a second thought you'll agree. Traditionally, we've thought of publishing as books, newspapers, etc. That is still true to a large and very important extent. We don't have to change our thinking about that just yet. Any rumours you may have heard about the demise of paper books are greatly exaggerated. Which is not to say that publishing is not changing precipitously, it is. But, while the web and other electronic publishing forms are becoming increasingly important , paper-based publishing is not going to go away for quite some time. (On the other hand, if I were a manufacturer of celuloid and paper-based silver-halide photographic products, I'd be looking over my shoulder every five minutes. But that's a story for another page.)

There are many, many software products available for doing web design, writing and publishing. Part of my ongoing professional development is keeping up with the latest and greatest stuff in this field. It happens that I'm a bit of a nerd and as a result I enjoy keeping up because it gives me a chance to experiment and play with new products and new ideas.

Part of my job is deciding when to use what software in which situation.

As it happens, Lynn Park Place is a collection of web sites. There are these pages the home page and some others that are at the apex of the site. Then there are a number of sub-sites such as Versions of Truth and DocInSite that, could actually stand on their own as seperate webs. In fact, at some time they may.

It's convenient to have the overall site divided into sub sites because that makes it convenient to use different software tools for each. Here is how the Lynn Park Place site breaks down, tool-wise:

Now why would I want to complicate my life by using all these different products and adding to my work load? Well, the altruistic reason is that I want to show you, to the extent there is a perceptable difference, the way different products "look" on the web. The not so altruistic reason I mentioned earlier: I wan to keep in touch with these products and understand their strengths and weaknesses so that I can do my job better.