Jamie Balfour

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Jamie Balfour'sPersonal blog

Jamie Balfour'sPersonal blog

It has taken me most of last weekend and some of today (I have other work to be doing for my PhD as well, so I can't give this full dedication) to get here, but I'm happy to say that DragonScript 2 is finally here on my website.

All pages have yet to have this but any page which is within sections from A-M are now enabled for DragonScript 2 apart from my developer tools. You can probably see the speed difference between the two.

Oh and it was exactly 4 years ago tomorrow that I rebuilt my website for the first time, and for the very first time used HTML5 and CSS. Version 2.0 was finally released tomorrow 4 years after a long struggle to rebuild the content. Now in version 3.7 I'm quite happy with the way things are, particularly now with DragonScript 2 and BalfBlog.

DragonScript is the PHP system I made and use to power my website. It's a pretty genius way of making my website highly consistent and flexible. It allows me to make a single page in a matter of seconds. Previous to DragonScript I had a silly less capable way of managing my content. Now with this improved version I need not worry because it is all handled efficiently and quickly by DragonScript.

But now in 2017, two years after DragonScript was first used on my website, it is coming to an end. Well at least version 1 is. The new version DragonScript 2 is miles better. It is more efficient with memory and handles things better.

DragonScript originally worked by including a PHP file that was a template and providing several variables. No longer does it do this. Part 1 is still true but now in part 2 it includes the one $dragonscript variable which provides an array of values that are used to tell the server what to do. Things were messy in the original version of DragonScript and things like $beforeParseInclude variables were just plainly unused. 

DragonScript 2 also provides a new system which finds the name of the webpage and finds associated files. For instance if the page was called index.php it would look for index.head.php and index.foot.php for any additional code needed. As you'd imagine, this system is far easier to maintain too.

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