Finally finding the groove again

[mdlbear]

Spent a couple of hours last night fixing my website updating code -- my ISP finally did the sensible thing and eliminated updating by FTP (you can still upload, but you can't overwrite existing files), so I finally got around to making the changes I've been thinking about for years, starting with using ssh and having a per-site configuration file controlling the upload.

The main features are these:

• The whole thing is done using a makefile that includes a shared rule file. This, in turn, includes the site configuration file from SRCDIR, the root of the tree to be uploaded. The config file defines DSTDIR and HOST.
  
• The main make targets are put.log, which uploads everything new in the local directory, and put, which does the recursion.
  
• There's a recursive setup target that makes a first draft of the Makefile and HEADER.html in every uninitialized subdirectory.
  

Still to be done are the fixup script to simplify the transition from the old ftp-based system, parametrizing the upload/synchronization method (to add CVS, rsync, and unison), and adding a download mechanism to synchronize sites that allow user contributions (like wikis and, um, blogs).

It's good to finally have recovered some motivation for working on my personal software projects; for too long I've been content to merely think about them (I love work; I can sit and watch it for hours). Hope I can keep it up.