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ps|ocm - Why This System Is Being Developed

Published September 20, 2023

ps|ocm started because of an internal need (as so many projects do). The initial plan was to develop this web site completely manually and use Server Side Includes to "automate" as much as possible. After a bit of brainstorming, the initial though was "this is possible", followed by "this is going to get really complicated real fast". That's why we came up with the concept of ps|ocm to have a piece of software make this and other web sites easier to manage.

You may ask yourself why we did not use an established blogging software. The short answer is that past experience did not go well (the web host sent an e-mail stating that the blogging software had become a spam server). We decided to only host plain HTML files for a variety of reasons so the thought was to have a piece of software that can manage the interconnectedness of a web site while keeping the maintenance and content development simple (plain text files).

Of course, this lead from serving pages that are arranged into topics to adding keywords and then adding a blog and then adding the ability to add more (you know how the ideas start flowing and the "it can do this and this and this" wish list gets started). At the same time, we wanted to actually get a site published so we made the decision to develop it in stages and then allow for the publication of the site as these stages get completed.

Here are the basic ideas:

ITEM: Simple to edit content. HTML files are basically just text files with markup. The idea is to keep the plain text files and simplify the markup so that the software does the bulk of the "getting it right" for the browser without needing to remember which tags are needed and to close the tags in the right spot. ITEM: A well connected web site. One of the pieces that we thought would get overwhelming is trying to make the web site behave like it should with links to the most recent articles showing up in multiple places, list of articles under topics, and a master index of keywords. While this can technically be done by hand, you can imagine how this would get out of control as the site grew in size. Therefore the software should be designed to do this automatically. ITEM: Ability to Expand. The program should be built with the future in mind so adding new features, enhancing existing ones, or making it flexible so that it can change the output (what will be published) to meet the needs of a particular site. This, of course, is good practice in general. ITEM: Security By publishing plain text files, security will be baked in and we won't need to worry about things like "is the blogging software up to date" or "did the last update break something else". We also get to screen the feedback to make sure people don't post links to sites that we don't want them to (spam) or make unnecessary/hurtful comments for the world to see.

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