About ThePostHole.org

This website was programmed and designed from scratch by David Harker to provide a lean online publication platform specifically for The Post Hole. It is built on and was constructed using free open source software. It is powered by LigHTTPD, PHP5, MySQL and Linux and based on the CodeIgniter MVC web application development framework.

The web-geek's favourite features

• Dynamic generation of the nicely formatted PDF versions of each release via a custom XHTML to LaTeX filter (using perl compatible regular expressions) and the LaTeX typesetting language and command line document processor pdflatex. This is great because it means nobody needs to do any more work to produce the print edition, and it can be regenerated if any changes are made (e.g. correction of a typo) in about one second. Fairly nippy, then. The PDF generator also creates a tiny url for long links so they don't spoil the page layout.
• Dynamic generation of RSS feeds allowing you to subscribe to our feed and get updates when we release a new edition in the RSS reader of your choice. You can subscribe via your browser or this button in the menu:
• Dynamic generation of a sitemap. Sitemaps are XML formatted directories of the content on a site. The sitemap for the posthole is here. Sitemaps allow priorities to be assigned to each page between zero and one, these priorities indicate to search engines which content is more important, relevant or interesting. As such, the ratings given to articles (via the star box at the top of each article) are used to calculate these and so our sitemap always reflects in real time which articles people like the most. This hopefully means that the most popular articles we publish will be above our least popular in search engine results.

And finally...

Thanks to Ally Carmichael for the photograph of the ring of Brodgar which is used in the heading. All in all I think it's a bit prettier than the one the CBA use ;-)

Some techy links