Creating a Web Page Tweaking Helper Tool(Part 1)

March 8th, 2008 Posted in Software Development, Trails, Utilities

 

This is my first Trail.

What is a Trail? A Trail is what I’m calling a series of articles centered around a specific project or task such as building a software application, configuration a piece of software, working with some kind of hardware, etc. I will take you through the steps involved including my thought process and decisions throughout the process. Each Trail will start out with a description, the goals for the Trail and what we’ll end up with in the end. At the end of the process anything that is produced such source code and application executables will be freely available for download.

Comments and suggestions are always welcome.

I’ve been working on this web site for a couple of days now and the development cycle is starting to get really monotonous. Tweaking my WordPress theme goes something like this. Make a small change to the style sheet or one of the .php files in a text editor, switch to my FTP program and upload the changed file, switch the my browser and refresh the page to see what my change did, repeat, repeat, repeat. There has to be a way to speed up this process! I’m going to make a utility program to automate some of the steps.

First I’m going to try to eliminate the FTP step. I’m going to develop an application that can be pointed to the directory on my hard drive that contains the local copies of the files I’m editing. This local directory structure will mirror the directory structure on my web site. I will also point the application to the same directory structure on my web site’s FTP server. The application will monitor my local directory for changes to any files. When the application detects that a file has changed it will automatically upload the file to my web site. Now I can go to my browser, click refresh and see the results of my change.

That will eliminate one step in the process but I want to make it even better. Phase 2 of this project will be to eliminate having to manually refresh the browser. I will embed a web browser into the application and whenever a file is uploaded to the web site the browser window will automatically refresh.

At the end of this Trail we will have a fully functional application and a full set of source code.

This new application will really speed up the edit, upload, test cycle of my web site tweaking.