Whoooo are you? -Reply

[Roy Tennant]

I recently activated non-executable server-side includes on SunSITE, and 
I agree that they can greatly help in maintaining standard blocks of text 
in your pages. But I have one thing to add to Michael's message below. 
Since we index our Web site, if we gave our text snippets the .html 
filename extension, they would show up in our search results. By merely 
dropping the extension entirely they do not clutter our Web index. The 
filename extension is most definitely not needed for server-side includes 
and in fact may cause problems. Other than that, I am quite happy with 
server-side includes and we have so far not detected any significant 
server load issue despite parsing *all* html files. By the way, we also 
drop filename extensions on our template files, so they do not get 
indexed as well.
Roy Tennant Digital Library SunSITE
http://sunsite.berkeley.edu/

On Wed, 13 Aug 1997, Michael Squires (michael) wrote:

> Going back to a discussion of a few months ago about the value of
> server-side includes, this is one of the places that SSI can pay off big
> time. Even if everyone can't quite agree on some of the look&feel issues
> within a site, if you can get a consensus that "we will have some
> standard 'stuff' at the top, and some other standard 'stuff' at the
> bottom", then you can create an initial "topstuff.html" and
> "botstuff.html", and have everyone just put the appropriate "#include
> topstuff.html" etc. on their pages. Then the content of that can evolve
> \without/ forcing everyone to go back and mung their pages by hand.
> 
> When you add this to the approach that Brian Carney outlined (have a
> standard button that fetches more info about the page in question), then
> you've got a very powerful and flexible approach.
> 
> 
> 	-----Original Message-----
> 	From:	Dan Lester [SMTP:DLESTER at bsu.idbsu.edu]
> 	Sent:	Monday, August 11, 1997 4:45 PM
> 	To:	Multiple recipients of list
> 	Subject:	RE: Whoooo are you? -Reply
> 
> 	>>> "Brian Carney (carney)" <carney at sequent.com>
> 	08/11/97 02:26pm >>>
> 	We designed one solution to this problem, implemented in
> 	the digital library that is the center of our corporate
> Intranet. 
> 	Pages include a 'pageinfo' button at the top which displays
> 	the name of the person who published the page, date and
> 	time of last update, content owner, etc.  Use this information
> 	to identify the team that built the page, and thus you can
> 	know where you are.  However, this required a technical
> 	approach to metadata capture/organization/use  which isn't
> 	part of the usual Web server.
> 	------------------
> 	This is an important issue, and you've found one of the many
> 	solutions.  We happen to use a lower tech one.  Some use
> 	frames for that purpose.  We just have a "boilerplate footer"
> 	which I give a copy of to all who are creating page content. 
> 	They change the name and mailto to theirs, and then drop in
> 	to the bottom of every page.  It includes snailmail address for
> 	library, phone number, name and mailto for the person
> 	responsible for the page, time and date last updated, and
> 	counters for each day and total since first creation.  Of
> 	course anyone who doesn't want all that can do a more
> 	minimalist solution.  I'm now working on redoing that
> 	boilerplate and tightening up the layout.  Someday I'll get
> 	someone working on web pages that is "more of a design
> 	professional", which I'd never claim to be.  I'm also hoping our
> 	folks will finally agree on a more consistent look and feel. 
> 	Since I can't force anyone to do anything, implementation
> 	isn't totally consistent.  In fact, I need to add it to some of
> my
> 	older pages as well.
> 
> 	You can find examples of our method at
> 	http://library.idbsu.edu/ and many pages thereunder.  
> 
> 	dan
> 	 
>