Home  Info  Starships  Fleet Yards  Treknology  Episodes  Database  Fandom  Community	New York Streets Set   FAQ   Site Map

Site Projects

Technical Improvements - New Content

Owing to the size of this site and to my reluctance to release anything half-baked, major updates generally take a long time. Sometimes several years. Here are some bigger projects that I am working on or that I would like to take on besides the necessary regular updates. Feel free to comment on my ideas and to bring forward suggestions!

Technical Improvements

Automated feed creation I currently add news to my RSS feed completely manually, meaning that I copy the text from my HTML update announcements and paste them into the RSS file. I often have to rephrase it too, because RSS doesn't allow inline links. Automating this whole procedure would save me a lot of work. With the update information entered into an online form, a PHP script could create the feed and an HTML fragment to be included via SSI in one step.

An Atom feed instead of RSS may even be given visually the same format as the HTML news list. Yet, Atom (or rather its parsing) is extremely pedantic and collapses at the slightest impurity of the syntax. I tried it, and while RSS worked immediately, I gave up on Atom when it still didn't work after three hours of unsuccessful debugging.

It seems that what I have in mind has never been done before, and this must have a reason. The feed creation script has a high priority nonetheless.

Comment form and database Many recent websites have a "Comment on this page" link at the end of each page. But how can I add comments to static HTML pages that are deemed to remain as they are until I upload a new version? In fact, all commenting features that I have checked out work in conjunction with PHP pages and a database like MySQL. While I can run PHP and MySQL on my server, the available scripts all seem to be part of a larger content management system that is incompatible with static HTML and therefore largely useless for my purposes.

What I need is a script that can run from any kind of page, with the name of the page as a parameter. Clicking on the SSI-included link "Comment on this page" would take the visitor to a new PHP page with a form and a list of previous comments, if available. Much like a guestbook, but with separate data for each page. The data could be stored in a MySQL database, in one flat file or in a variety of files, such as "constitution.txt" for the comments about the page "constitution.htm". Unfortunately PHP is incompatible with SSI, otherwise I could even think of a method to embed the comments into the page itself (in something like an inline frame). I would have to implement an efficient spam protection as well.

While I have a clear idea how this script should work (as an intermediate step between a guestbook and a message board and the probably fastest method for visitors to make suggestions), I didn't find anything half-way suited so far that I could base my script on.

Display of "lean" site statistics and of a counter I will get rid of Sitemeter sooner or later, because this web-based counter used a cookie to monitor visitor movements. I found a way to reduce the function of the counter to just counting, circumventing the cookie creation. But as Sitemeter doesn't work properly any longer, it may be time to create an on-site counter. I would also like to post a live summary of the EAS web statistics instead of just a few figures that I need to update manually.

I have no less than three big commercial statistics packages installed on my server. But there does not seem to be anything like a plug-in to incorporate their results into a publicly available web page, much less to create a counter for individual pages. I could install a less sophisticated analysis software on my server, but it would have to be a very reliable one, one that wouldn't count double hits to pages. Maybe it will turn out easy, but I am still searching.

Conversion of whole site to CSS This is more a dream than a real project. Maybe someone can help me write a script that would automatically convert the whole site to CSS. The tables should remain the way they are though. I think it's not possible. At least not with excessive manual correction, especially of the countless <font> or </font> fragments that are often inconsistent (I am still using Frontpage!) and that the script may not able to eliminate in a way that the layout is not totally messed up afterwards.

New Content

Article series on warp propulsion This project is not dead, although the last comparably small update was in 2005. I need to do a lot of research before I take on new chapters, but I'm planning to get at least Chapter 3 :Subspace and Chapter 6: Warp Speed Measurement done in a couple of months. It depends on how much work I have to spend on more urgent tasks, although I definitely would rather like to care about this project, which is not only very big but also quite popular, as I can tell from frequent requests to finally update it.

Completion of TNG and DS9 reviews This is the second section that visitors would like to see updated. Maybe I should really watch some episodes again, as I haven't seen most TNG and DS9 episodes in years. So I may mix "business" with pleasure, but I must get my hands on those DVD boxes first...

Species/planet or device/weapon database The Starship Database is complete after the addition of TAS (and don't bother to ask, I will never add any ships from games or RPGs). So what can I categorize next? Basically it should be something that isn't already covered at Memory Alpha in great detail, because my private website could never compete with that. Still, I could imagine that a database on planets and/or species in the same style as the ships could be a handy reference. Or one on the various technical devices, although caring about things that were often seen for just a second may become a bottomless pit. I could focus my interest on weapons though. 

Study of the changes in TOS Remastered Although Trekmovie.com has already done a thorough job to compare TOS screen caps with their TOS-R counterparts, it may be worth doing much the same in a condensed format. I would also like to evaluate and comment on the changes in TOS-R. Which has precedence: TOS because it was first, or rather TOS-R because it fixes or refines many effects that were insufficiently considered or executed in TOS?

Treknology vs. real life This is an idea that I am thinking about for quite some time, and that is occasionally suggested by visitors as well. How about a thorough and scientifically correct comparison of Trek devices and their (emerging) counterparts in the real world? Science journalists very often cite Star Trek whenever a new development in the real world seems to mimic some function of a phaser or of the transporter. I could add a Trek perspective (without resorting to Technobabble).

The advantage of this project is that it can be gradually expanded and can grow as big as I like.

Back to About index

Home   Top
	Last modified: 25.07.07
http://www.ex-astris-scientia.org/misc/projects.htm