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Under the Gun, Part 4
by Rebecca Rohan
Meet Your Deadline (instead of the executioner)
Take It to the Top
The site that features "E-mail to God," among other attractions, also has a heavenly plan for daily updates. Avi Moskowitz, president of Virtual Jerusalem, says "We need to change various elements on our home page every day...updating the page, if we were to do it daily on the day itself, is not only very time consuming, but it means that there is less time to concentrate on other aspects of the site." Moskowitz reveals a better way: "We prepare a home page where we have a calendar of the year programmed. It is a table of every day of the year, together with the filename of the file that will be pulled up automatically for that day to replace the home page, and a short description of the day's page." Moskowitz says it takes an hour a day to do what it would take three to accomplish without the calendar.
Secret Tools of the Digerati Revealed!
Dead links can kill the professional aura of your site, but tracking down links can take forever at heavily linked sites. Bill Eastman, Computer Programmer and Webmaster at the Texas Commission for the Blind, uses Surflogic's WebWatch 1.1 to check links for him while he does other things. "It takes a couple of minutes to get it started," says Eastman. The output is in HTML format, which Eastman views in his browser. If locations have changed, he cuts and pastes them to his original HTML file, which he's opened in Notepad. Then he checks the links that timed out at some point during the following day. "I'm using server-side includes to put the last modified information in," says Eastman. "That's easier than trying to remember to change it."
"The single biggest time savers I have found recently are multiple-file search and replace tools," says Jeff De Tray. "This allows me to change an element in every page on our site in seconds. Doing this page by page would take hours."
De Tray uses two tools to accomplish this task. One is the HTML editor for Windows 95, Web Media Publisher: "What a time saver this is! I've replaced 30 lines of HTML in 150 files at once with this program." The second tool he uses is a Perl script,
treesed, which also searches and replaces across multiple files. "It would not be easy to use treesed to replace a large section of text with embedded carriage returns and such, because you have to enter the target and replacement strings from the command line," De Tray says. "I am much more apt to use Web Media Publisher for search and replace because [the Win 95 program is] entirely off-line. With treesed, I'm usually altering 'live' files..."
"To use either tool efficiently," says De Tray, "it's absolutely necessary that you be consistent in the structure of your pages. All of my pages are exactly the same as far as headers and footers go, so changing the look and feel across many files is fairly easy with one of these tools."
Thinking about your site's consistency is increasingly important for today's Web sites. Tools that convert word processing documents into HTML may depend on your word processing styles for formatting cues. This can be important if you decide to put legacy documents on the Web or on an intranet as a knowledge base.
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