On Wednesday I started a postgraduate certificate in learning and teaching in higher education. I think. It sounds a bit like that, anyway. We'll be expected to submit a portfolio at the end of the course, showing how we have become professional, reflected practitioners. Rather than put a load of crud in a folder, I've decided to build a little site to hold my stuff. The idea is that it is primarily a journal - articles sorted in date order. The articles will contain links to longer pieces, which will be stored in a neat higher^H^H^H^Heir^H^H^Hierarchy so that they can be viewed in "theme order". This is good because:
- It suits my learning style
- I am using my existing schema as I build new ones
- The non-linear nature of the document gives freedom to its readers
- It's exactly the kind of crap that the tree hugging hippies who will be marking it would like
The whole thing is based around a little content management system that I'm writing specifically for this purpose. I could have used something that's already out there, but then I would have hardly any incentive to do the damned thing.
Because I only ever used to use Perl for small scripts to translate one thing into another and such, I never realised how bloody awful it is. I would really liked to have done this in Python, but getting mod_python to work turned out to be way to much hassle.
I'll post my Perl code at some point. It would be nice to hear from some Perl gurus telling me how stupid I am and how I should do this instead of that or the other. Seriously - Perl is so bloody bendy, I can think of a number of ways to do anything, and I don't have the experience to know which way is best.
Yarrr. I almost forgot what day it be. Has some land-lubber already told ye all about my parroty error? Yarrr. I'll get me coat.