cocotron.org facelift

I recently switched cocotron.org over to a new site I have been chipping away at. There were a few things I knew I needed to do, page generation using a better template system which would help with content organization and fix a big annoyance with the examples.

The original site was done using server side includes with a simple header&footer template. If you've used SSI's you know how extremely limited they are, especially in the older version of Apache my hosting provider is using. I'm sure some people have done amazing stuff with just SSI's, but that is not me. I decided to write a CGI program to generate pages using Foundation on OS X and then get it working on the Linux shared hosting account where cocotron.org lives. One bug fix later in Cocotron it was generating pages on the Linux account. Most of the work was reorganizing the html of the old content, coming up with the new layout and updating some content.

One recurring problem with the examples and building apps in general is that the DLL's and framework resources need to be copied into the same directory as the .EXE in order to run the program. The documentation does describe this, but automating it during the build process would make it all a lot easier. So there is a new program in CDT which fixes this problem called retargetBundle, it does a fast copy, using modification dates, to copy the DLL's and resources as the final build stage. If you have the latest CDT and build an example, it should be ready to run.

Satisfied for now with the page generator I'll be updating the content more regularly and probably work on some new dynamic aspects of the site. This will improve the site and increase the use and testing of Cocotron on Linux.