Automatic date up-date

[Thomas Dowling]

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> From: Stephen Graham <sgraham at lbs.lon.ac.uk>
> To: Multiple recipients of list <web4lib at library.berkeley.edu>
> Subject: Automatic date up-date
> Date: Monday, January 06, 1997 11:25 AM
> 
> At the bottom of all our web pages we have a date of when that page 
> was last up-dated.  This is OK, but some of them do not need up-dating 
> regularly.  It looks bad if a date on a page is a few months old.  
> Does any one know of a way of  periodically automatically up-dating 
> the date on web pages with out actually going to each one 
> individually?
> 


If the files reside on a Unix server, it's probably pretty simple to
automate the process with a shell script and sed.  (General reminder to
everyone: you'll get more specific answers from the list if you provide
platform, version, and other relevant information.)

But why assume that a file "looks bad" just because it's a few months old? 
If a page is really stable and not liable to go out of date, just remove
the date.  Changing the date just to artificially make the page seem more
recent strikes me as a little less than truthful, albeit in a pretty
trivial way.

Thomas Dowling
tdowling at ohiolink.edu
Ohio Library and Information Network