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"At our home, we drink more water than ever. The H2Only water tastes great, I know it's clean and safe, and it shows up at my door as regular as clockwork. We're very happy with the product and the service. Thanks!"
Dana Williams - North St. Catharines

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About this website

Warning: much GeekSpeak will be taking place on this page...

This website is, in many ways, part of an evolutionary process in our learning curve with regards to web development, on several fronts. This page is then semi-biographical in nature insofar as it will be outlining the path taken to get to the site you are now visiting.

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For starters: a brief description of how this particular site works.

The servers we use are owned by GoLiveHost, using the relatively typical Linux/Apache server set-up. We are using PHP5/MySQL4 as server-side utilities. The site is optimized for HTML4.01 Transitional, CSS3, and Unix linebreaks, and apart from the occasional minor indiscretion, all pages in this site should pass the W3C validators

One would define this as a "static" website, by-and-large, rather than a database-driven one. In other words, almost all the content you see on the page exists as discreet text files. Having said that: the page you see (including this one) does not exist as a single text file. Rather, we are using php include files to build each page, and only have that content which is specific to a particular page actually in a particular HTML file (web page file).

Using include files has, for us, two significant advantages. For one thing, it allows us to have site-wide components that are constant. Should we decide to change a component of a page, such as a header or foooter, that change occurs over the entire site by simply changing one text file. For instance, look at the menu on the right side. Add a page to the site? No problem: update the "menu" text file, and that change is now available on every page that has the menu included. This page has, in fact, four such include files, one of them has three of it's own, and two of those three call yet other files. There are in fact a total of of a dozen discreet files creating the page you are currently viewing, yet while creating/editing pages we only see four lines of code.

Secondly: KISS. Way back in the '60's or '70's, a sales guru called Zig Ziglar coined that accronym. It stands for "Keep It Simple, Stupid." By way of explanation:

This page, when rendered though the server, ends up being a lot of text... it's actually quite a large document. Working on the site in a text editor as we do, using include files creates a significantly cleaner working environment. When completed, this entire page will fit on one and a half screens of my text editor. The actual served page takes up just over four screens (see for yourself: go to your browser's "source" view), and this text is very nearly at the bottom of that page, which results in a lot of scrolling, a lot of looking at text we don't need to be looking at, and way too much opportunity to accidentally change something we don't want or need to change!

There is one database being used for the site currently: the search function is driven by a php/mysql solution called Sphyder that uses a database for keyword indexing/storage and found-set creation. We explored flat-file systems, but this solution was so simple to implement we had to use it!

Why the general reluctance to drive the entire website via database? Well, again we have two reasons. The primary motivation is that we do our editing in a text editor, and do so off-line. That is, of course, not impossible in a database system... just transfer the data once written. However, that is another level of activity and layer of complexity, and avoidance of redundancy/complexity is a good thing, right?

Another reason is that we don't fully trust/understand SQL. We could certainly learn it or use an existing solution, but to achieve the same ends it didn't make much sense to go through the trouble. Backup of the database is critical, and it again adds a level of complexity. With the system we currently use, we have an automatic backup in that we create the site locally and FTP incremental uploads maintaining a synchronized copy at all times... keeping with the KISS principal.

Finally, a couple of minor reasons: folks who "know better" are going to argue otherwise, but we suspect that the search engines prefer static content. OK... that clearly wasn't a minor reason: search engines are a very important component of any work we do here.

The very last reason? We can easily repurpose/edit data using this method. Using a database system requires an entire administrative interface to accomplish that, and it has to happen on-line/on-server... and, well, KISS!

The H2Only site uses a number of pieces of PHP code, other utilities, and imagery that are freely available on the internet. It's one of the main reasons we use and like PHP: it has a large, active, and generous userbase that allows folks like us to create sites we would not normally be able to create. Open source is important, and supporting it is something we believe in at H2Only. This site has been developed very much with that in mind. It is a 'template' site, and in the next few months we intend to package it and make it freely available for download and use... perhaps by you!

Our developmental software includes: