My father-in-law, Norman is an experience yachtsman and editor of the Irish Cruising Club’s Sailing Directions for the coasts of Ireland. To promote the books, he decided to produce an online extract for the leisure craft to use who are turning up to enjoy the Galway leg of the Volvo Ocean Race, it would also serve as a prototype for an e-book distribution of the entire book.  As my family’s IT support department, naturally, he asked my advice on producing such an edition.  Having discussed the options we decided a web application wrapped up as an Adobe AIR application.

So to allow Norman to edit and re-arrange the content, I decided to use WordPress to produce the site. As a dynamic web platform, I had to find a way to take the dynamic, PHP, database driven site into a static site which could be packaged up into an AIR application. Actually, this happen to be much easier than I anticipated. A cunning wget script and I had a nice static site to produced the offline application, suitable for yachtsman to use on their boats without an Internet connection.