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Posted by mike on January 21, 2007, 4:06 pm
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I help manage a large web site, one that has over
600 html pages... It's a reference site for ham radio
folks and as an example, one page indexes over
1.8 gb of on-line PDF documents.
The site is structured as an upside-down tree, and
(if I remember correctly) never more than 4 levels.
The site basically grew (like the creeping black blob) ...
all the pages were created in Notepad over the last
10 years.
We're now having to re-arrange the site, and find that
we have to move entire folders of pages to other
locations.
Many pages have embedded in their text hard-coded
links to other pages. In addition, every page has, in
the upper left corner (and repeated in the lower left
corner) one to three hard-coded links the the level(s)
above it.
Moving one index page requires editing everything
that points to it and from it, and moving a glossary
page would require editing over 100 pages (scattered
across almost every folder) that pointed to it.
I've been told to use Microsoft FrontPage as it allows
you to automatically updating other links when a page
is changed or moved. Others have said that Dreamweaver
will do it. Others have said that "Hot Metal Pro" will do it,
or Adobe GoLive.
The only one of the above that I have had access to for
experimentation is Front Page and after experimenting
with it for a while I have decioded that it is NOT an option
due to the typical Microsoft "BLOAT". It would create
more problems than it would solve.
Every one of our pages is lean and mean html, and I've found
that you can suck any one of the pages into FP-2000 (the
only version I have access to) and it IMMEDIATELY reformats
it and there is no option to prevent that.
My experimentation settled on this: You suck in a page file,
flag the page as having been changed (even by just adding
one character somewhere, even in a meta tag) and then save
the page and you will find that it is mote than triple the size...
(mostly due to division, style and font tags that were added
behind your back). _this is unacceptable_. Maybe this
behavior has been fixed in FP-XP or some replacement,
I do not know.
Our audience is over 60% dialup and download speed is
important (which is why we hand edit everything and use
mostly html 3 standards).
How do other folks manage large web sites with regard
to changing pages which affects many other folders
and pages within the web site?
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Posted by Sherm Pendley on January 21, 2007, 4:34 pm
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> How do other folks manage large web sites with regard
> to changing pages which affects many other folders
> and pages within the web site?
First, configure your web server to return a 301 Moved Permanently for the
old URLs. That will redirect requests for the old URLs to the new ones. If
you're using Apache, you can use the RedirectPermanent directive for that.
Now, apply the "squeaky wheel" rule. Watch your web server logs and see which
redirects are getting hit the most often, and what their referrers are. Those
referrers (assuming they're your pages) will be the pages you want to update
first.
Another reason to watch those referrers: There may be "deep links" from out-
side your site that lead to a page you've moved. As a courtesy, you can let
those folks know that they need to update their links.
The 301 redirect only takes an additional fraction of a second, even on dial-
up, so you don't need to feel pressured to find and fix every last link at
the same time. That kind of pressure often leads to a rushed job, which leads
to mistakes.
As far as actually making the edits goes, I'm a Mac guy, so I'm not familiar
enough with Windows software to make a specific recommendation. As you've
mentioned, you want to avoid anything that rewrites your code behind your
back. Beyond that, any editor that can do a multi-file search & replace will
be a big help.
sherm--
--
Web Hosting by West Virginians, for West Virginians: http://wv-www.net
Cocoa programming in Perl: http://camelbones.sourceforge.net
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Posted by Lars Eighner on January 21, 2007, 4:57 pm
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In our last episode,
talented mike broadcast on comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html:
> How do other folks manage large web sites with regard
> to changing pages which affects many other folders
> and pages within the web site?
To maintain a site like that I think you need some combination of
a database and a scripting or preprocessing language.
This would allow you to refer to links symbolically in page templates,
change the links as necessary in your database, and generate pages with the
scripting or preprocessing language. For the scripting/preprocessing
component, the major choices are perl and PHP. Although PHP is widely used
to generate pages dynamically, it can also be used as an offline
preprocessor (CLI --- command line interface). Both PHP and perl have
support for a variety of databases, one of which is likely to be suitable to
your platform. A make utilitity is also very handy for keeping track of
dependencies so you need only regenerate those pages actually affected by
particular changes instead of having to regenerate the whole site for every
little change.
--
Lars Eighner <http://larseighner.com/> <http://myspace.com/larseighner>
Countdown: 730 days to go.
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Posted by Ben C on January 21, 2007, 5:07 pm
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[snip]
> Many pages have embedded in their text hard-coded
> links to other pages. In addition, every page has, in
> the upper left corner (and repeated in the lower left
> corner) one to three hard-coded links the the level(s)
> above it.
>
> Moving one index page requires editing everything
> that points to it and from it, and moving a glossary
> page would require editing over 100 pages (scattered
> across almost every folder) that pointed to it.
[snip]
> How do other folks manage large web sites with regard
> to changing pages which affects many other folders
> and pages within the web site?
We don't know exact details, but what you want is fairly easy to do with
a short script in Python, Tcl, Perl etc., or even with a powerful text
editor like vim.
If you don't know any of those tools, any time spent learning any of
them will quickly pay for itself.
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Posted by William Hughes on January 21, 2007, 5:53 pm
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On 21 Jan 2007 13:06:41 -0800, in comp.infosystems.www.authoring.html
>I help manage a large web site, one that has over
>600 html pages... It's a reference site for ham radio
>folks and as an example, one page indexes over
>1.8 gb of on-line PDF documents.
[...]
>Many pages have embedded in their text hard-coded
>links to other pages. In addition, every page has, in
>the upper left corner (and repeated in the lower left
>corner) one to three hard-coded links the the level(s)
>above it.
[...]
>How do other folks manage large web sites with regard
>to changing pages which affects many other folders
>and pages within the web site?
I use a multi-file text editor for this and other things:
http://www.simes.clara.co.uk/programs/xchange.htm
FWIW, my site will eventually have 350+ pages. Moving, renaming or
splitting a file has serious ramifications.
--
William Hughes, San Antonio, Texas: cvproj@grandecom.net
The Carrier Project: http://home.grandecom.net/~cvproj/carrier.htm
Support Project Valour-IT: http://soldiersangels.org/valour/index.html
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