[WEB4LIB] Re: Use of ssi's--CORRECTION

[Eric Hellman]

Using database identifiers is definitely the right solution!

the big payoff is when you use this type of link for everything on 
your site, it becomes easier to maintain, upgrade, and switch.

And for now, there's no need to switch technology- you can just put 
SSI pages at the end of the database link.

Eric

>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

-- 
Eric Hellman

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