Website Technical Details
Hosting
The branch website is currently hosted by Fasthosts. Previously it was hosted by Streamline.net (since late 2004) until it was taken over.
Technologies Used
Local Coding
- HTML5 for presentation
- PHP for server-side HTML page generation.
- CSS3 for making pages look prettier than standard HTML.
- Actually, because Bootstrap 3 uses Less to generate CSS, its now been adopted site wide, and essentially uses CSS but with additional features and abstractions.
- Javascript a client-side technology for making web paged more interactive. Examples of external Javascript libraries used are given in the next section.
- XML for storing programme and tower data in a structured format, so the data can be re-used on multiple pages.
- RSS feed dynamically created by PHP for the latest updates from the branch.
- Cookies, see the Cookie Policy.
- Perl for off-line generation of the site index. This is just a one-off use for a text file parsing purpose, not endemic to the website.
External Javascript Library Re-use
- Bootstrap a front-end web framework for designing websites and web applications, particularly helpful for rendering on mobile devices.
- Node Package Manager because Less needs to be compiled into CSS. Since that "compilation" step is required, I took the opportunity to "minify" Javascript & CSS files for fast loading. To remove this technology, Less needs to be removed in favour of pure CSS.
- JQuery a popular JavaScript library designed to simplify the client-side scripting.
- Lightview for pop-up images.
- Masonry for the fitting multiple notices to a grid efficiently on notice board.
- Cooke Script for the management of cookies in order to be compliant with EU Cookie Law.
Internet-based Applications
ClustrMaps Visual Analytics
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