suPerlative: Summary
The scripts were developed over a period of 3 years, mostly by myself
and more recently by Lucy. So yes, there's quite a lot of person-hours
behind them.. We spent a lot of time coding Perl instead of HTML, but
once a script works you can use it over and over to create HTML pages,
so we gained a lot of 'leverage' (an overused buzzword, IMHO).
How do we carry out global updates ?
It depends; the site map is created by cmap.pl and so that's the one
that needs to be run to update the site map, while the
Authoring page
is created by ht - as are most other pages. However, both programs use
the ht subroutines so the changes e.g. in the URL of a menu item, need
to be made in one place only (ht_subs.pl).
Let's suppose I want to change something globally, e.g. move the
navigation menu from the bottom of the page to the right margin (there
are reasons why this is better than the left...). I would edit
ht_subs.pl and then go to the root directory of the web document tree,
and say 'find . -name "*.ht" -print>htt' - this would create a list of
all the .ht files (nearly 1500) we have, in the file called 'htt'. I
would then edit this file to put 'ht ' at the beginning of every line
(:g,^,s,,ht , in vi), ensure it has execute permission (chmod +x htt)
and run it.
That procedure could be streamlined a little - I could code most of it
directly into ht for example - but it's already fairly simple for anyone
comfortable in UNIX, vi, and Perl. Anything else would really be
syntactic sugar for novices, but if I get any indication that there are
some novices (or even veterans) who would appreciate the extra
automation, then I'll look into it.
That would get most of our pages; the remaining 100 or so are
updated
by the other procedures described, e.g. for the Vlib and the Glossary.
Updating the whole site (1600 pages) for a global change such as
changing a menu item, takes only a few minutes; ten at the most.. When
Mecklermedia bought the site, I moved it to their servers in less than
half a day - which amazed them. Now I had not only to change the ad
banner links, copyright and legal notices, but also the scripts, because
their directory structure was slightly different (hey, that's UNIX..).
I'd be interested to hear if anyone has had similar experiences with
commercial systems. I shudder to think of all that pointing and clicking
they might need to do comparable changes such as I described - but
perhaps I'm mistaken. But it seems to me that if you can actually
generate a whole site from scripts, you can do almost anything in a
relatively short time. But, this approach is really only good for
skilled programmers.
This article described our home-grown Perl scripts,
all of which are available for download.
Note that many of them require ht_subs.pl.
This software is provided freely on the understanding that the
Author will not be held responsible for any problems arising from it's
use, and that there is no support.
We wrote it for our own use, and you may well have to hack it
to suit your own needs.
If you make any general improvements
please feed back the new code, we will credit you in the source.
suPerlative: Downloading, Installation, and Usage
suPerlative Web Construction !
Please note that we offer no support for these scripts,
and we accept no liability for any problems they may cause.
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