Automatic date up-date

[Jon Knight]

On Mon, 6 Jan 1997, Stephen Graham wrote:
> 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?

Whats the point of putting the date that the page was last updated on the
page if you then go and fake it?  Surely the point of putting the date in
a place that is readable by the end user is so that they know how current
the information is.  My automagically tweaking the dates they loose any
meaning to the end users (and indeed become confusing and dangerous;
imagine if you overlook some important updates to a page detailing (say)
admissions procedures and then the auto-date-changing program comes along
and makes it look like the old procedures documented on the web page are
current. Oops, bad news.)

Having said that, under UNIX this is a doodle; just use cron to run a
small Perl script that changes the date on all pages that haven't been
modified in n days. 

Tatty bye,

Jim'll

-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-
Jon "Jim'll" Knight, Researcher, Sysop and General Dogsbody, Dept. Computer
Studies, Loughborough University of Technology, Leics., ENGLAND.  LE11 3TU.
* I've found I now dream in Perl.  More worryingly, I enjoy those dreams. *