Use of ssi's--CORRECTION

[Kenneth Irwin]

Quoth "Nancy Sosna Bohm" <plum at ulink.net>:

>First, to recap what I am asking:
>Is it insanity to to recode 25 pages of links to & info about our hundreds
>of databases using ssi's to "hide" and "show" the appropriate links when
>students are on or off campus (depending on IP range)?

Nancy,

Our approach has been to use a redirection script to handle the on- and
off-campus URL problem. All of our links look like:
http://www6.wittenberg.edu/redirect.php?http://www.jstor.org
The redirection script does a few things:
1) logs the transaction for statistical purposes
2) applies any temporary redirects (e.g. "our main server is down today, so
for just today send your users to this url instead...)
3) detects IP addresses and reroutes to our proxy server if necessary.

This approach could be adapted to your situation by doing what we should
have done in the first place: call all databases by an ID number instead of
URL, look up the appropriate URL in a database. That way you could have an
"off-campus URL" field and an "on-campus URL", and the redirect would fetch
whichever one is appropriate. Our databases are stored in a database, but
we've been doing all logging on URL, which is great until URLs change and
stats start getting weirded. If you're going to put in lots of work to
revise your links, how about going all the way to a solution that will be
easier to change later?

As for the initial change, it looks like it *might* be an automatable task
if you have a Perl-junkie in-house. I wouldn't try to automate it for a
small changeover, but 100s of DB's on 25 pages sounds like it might be
worth putting in code-time. Of course, given a job that would take 2 hours
to do by hand or 2 hours to automate, I'd rather take the automation route
because it'll be a challenge rather than a bore ;)

I hope this helps,
Ken


Ken Irwin	                            		kirwin at wittenberg.edu
Reference/Electronic Resources Librarian	(937) 327-7594
Thomas Library, Wittenberg University