About This Website
This website is a work in progress and something I do in my spare time. It is an attempt to create a dynamically generated website that uses some of the newer features of the internet, such as ajax (page content updates without a refresh of the entire page), while hopefully maintaining the capability of search engine robots to catalog the site.
The best way to make an 'ajaxed' site is to ensure the site works without javascript first, and then add the ajax on top of it. That way it works for visitors who may not have javascript turned on or available. I was originally going to make the site totally 'ajaxed' but found that this presented several problems. Among these was the 'broken' browser 'back' button and the rather complex effort it takes to get all navigation and references to work in both modes (javascript on or off). The final straw was the difficulty of sending someone a link to a specific page configuration without the link being complex and using a considerable amount of Apache mod_rewrite. Even so, most of the site is still full of ajax, not just the overall navigation.
Technically, the pages are generated with server side scripting with an interface to a server based database. Many buttons or links go both to a webpage in the normal manner (resulting in a page refresh) as well as a javascript function. If javascript is enabled in the browser, the page refresh request is not performed and the javascript function is called. Using javascript and asyncronous http requests (a request to the server for data that happens in the background), the same data generating script or other file from the server is called as if the page request was called. The returned text (or xml and whatever) is placed in the page by using the Document Object Model (DOM) to replace an element's content without a complete page refresh.
It is all rather a slow work in process, but I do have grand plans!
About Me
UC Davis, BSAE/ME, MSME, USMC, USAFTPS, USNTPS, Flown Lots, Been All Over, Photography, Computers, Apologetics and Jesus. Not necessarily in that order.