Apologia

This site has had a few design ideas taken to the extreme.

The site functionality (the scripts) should be available so that anyone with a problem can diagnose and report it

This was the first functionality to be introduced. All of my scripts have a Comment me link.

The comment is appended to the bottom of the script which caused the reaction. There are two reasons for my doing this, the first is so that I can record a reaction to a script when using it, without getting diverted into fixing it then, or recording it elsewhere. Secondly I hope to enable someone to learn Perl as it is the most delightful language.

The colour choices on the site should be configurable

The configuration script was available for a long time, but is currently outdated and consequently broken; and anyway noone but me ever used it :(

The reason, however, for choosing to make online configuration available was fun. I do not have any great colour sense and the first few attempts I made at colouring the site were greatly displeasing to some. My answer, as always, is don't tell me about it, change it yourself.

Anyone with web connectivity and webspace or diskspace can copy the site

This is nearly achieved, in as much as you can copy all the templates, files, images and scripts. However the idea would be to make a 'download the site' script.

This is useful to me personaly, as in keeping with the O'Reilly slogan, I have a website on every desk. I have a lot of computers and use more. When they are not on my home lan I want a mechanism of installing Paneris on a foreign machine.
However it is also hoped that someone, someday will copy the site of their own accord.
Following in the footsteps of other computer successes, such as M$DoS and Windows, Perl, Netscape et al I don't intend to stop people paying me the complement of copying my site by asking them to pay me money.

The site should be browser independant and quick

As far as possible I try to write clean HTML, but as the validate button on beta pages reveals, I don't always manage it.

The site uses images sparingly but more importantly pages that you might wish to view are created at all nodes. I have not yet written the monitoring software to enable me to determine which pages have never yet been visited, but I will.

The site should contain all its pervious versions

It started doing this a month ago.

I just think that Version Control is cool. I want to see the past.

The site should be maintainable online, with nothing more than a web-browser

It is, largely, but I still FTP the scripts up.

This is to enable those whith less knowledge or facilities to be able to play, as I really hate to exclude anyone, they do it to themselves as it is.

Summary

Paneris is designed to enable it to be designed, which I will do when I get around to it. In the meantime, why don't you do some?

Final Plea

Hey, it seemed a good idead at the time.


Document Dated: Thu Sep 24 2:26:56 1998
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