Joachim Breitner's Homepage

Now that my laptop has returned from the support, I just had to do some things, even if I should be in bed since a few hours...

Until now, my personal website was run by AxKit, a mod_perl based framework that serves xml files after a server side XSLT transformation. As AxKit needs apache1, I had proxied all requests via my apache2 server to the old apache1 installation on a different port. Understandable, this is not very nice.

So today, I looked at how I can create the html files using the same XML and XSLT code locally and have apache2 serve the files statically. With xsltproc, this was pretty easy, you can see the result in this Makefile. Note that I have a small XSLT script that lists all "pages", which are sections of one big xml file. Apache's Multiviews allows my visitors to enter the URLs without .html, so that old links continue to work.

My other AxKit based site, the German parody news "Heisse News", had some difficulties, as it is based on AxKits ability to create XML directory listings. I solved this with a index.xml which is created directly by this directory's Makefile. The old ".xml" links are internally rewritten to ".html" links using mod_rewrite. This was also a good time to re-activate the rss feed, which has it's own XSLT stylesheet. To make that feed valid, I had to do some ugly stuff to create a proper RFC2822 date, but using xsltsl's date-time.xsl, this works now, too.

As always, comments welcome.