North Knight Software

SlimPage has been updated. There was a slight error in the CSS that caused it to render the navigation buttons improperly in Internet Explorer.

Head over to the SlimPage information page to download the new version.

Dalhousie University's Faculty of Graduate Studies recently put live the Interdisciplinary PhD Defence Tagcloud developed by North Knight Software.

The tagcloud was the original implementation of SlimPage, which is used to display information about any particular keyword. The information used to create the cloud was originally compiled in Access, then stored in a PostgreSQL database, and then manipulated using a PHP application. While the creation of the Access and PostgreSQL databases was handled by the technical staff at the Faculty of Graduate Studies, the PHP and Javascript programming, as well as the tag cloud markup, was done by North Knight Software.

As part of a project that we were working on, we decided that we needed some sort of 'popup' functionality that would grab information off the server and show it off without reloading the whole page. Lightbox is a very popular (and ubiquitous) image gallery library that did something like we were looking at.

Gavin found a library called Slimbox, a light-weight Lightbox clone based on the MooTools framework (which he had found a few weeks previous and we both thought was pretty neat). It's a great little image gallery, and a good step in the right direction, but it wasn't a complete solution.

MooTools has an HTTP request object within its framework, in addition to a suite of fantastic CSS animation and tweening tools, so I figured it wouldn't be too hard to make it work with that instead of just grabbing images. It wasn't! Aside from a few hitches with obscure edge cases it went quite smoothly. Another big hitch was that a version 1.2 of MooTools came out while I was working on it, and I decided to jump ships to the version. It was a bit wonky (the API has changed in a number of ways) but it's worth it; MooTools is a great library to work with and 1.2 brings in a lot of nice features and seems to tighten up the API quite well.

So was born SlimPage. It's a nifty little library that allows you to load any page from your webserver into a small pop up. It will also allow any of the links in that popup to open in the same popup, and keep a history of what you've visited so you can go back. Take a look on the SlimPage information page. There is a link there to a live version that demonstrates its capabilities.

If you end up using SlimPage for anything (which you're more than free to do — it's under the MIT license) we'd love to hear about it.

After deciding that we would need a news section at some time in the future, I started looking for an open source content management system. I wanted something simple and straightforward, and was hoping something which used plain-text files instead of a database. Eventually settled on Blosxom (pronounced: blossom), a text-based journaling system built in Perl.

After playing around with Blosxom for a bit, I was mostly happy, but there were some issues. I started to modify the package, but a strong dislike for Perl overwhelmed me, and I soon found myself starting from scratch on a Blosxom-like written in PHP. Once I had the meat of my new version written, and liked where things were heading, I decided to name it Osxome (pronounced: awesome). The name shouldn't be taken too seriously.

I've finished the first version, and it's up for grabs. I'm fairly happy with the way it turned out, and I'll certainly be using it for personal projects and small things around the office. I'll also be making more releases going forward to make it more friendly and useful. I don't think I'll be adding too many more features to it, however. There are precious few pieces of bloat-free journaling/blogging software around.

One thing I've hyped up a little bit is the secureness of the application. It's not actually that big a deal usually, but when on a shared hosting server, a database is a difficult thing to keep properly secure. If you don't need or want robust content management features, plain-text is actually a pretty nice option.

Anyway, feel free to check the thing out.