[Web4lib] reorganizing a web site

[John Creech]

On Tue, 1 Nov 2005, Kathy Gaynor wrote:

> 1. How have you gone about organizing the files on your server?  Do you put 
> everything under a subdirectory (e.g. ../facility/hours.html)?  Or are some 
> things left in the root directory (e.g. ../hours.html)?

Kathy, without knowing your server hardware & software, I can say that we 
saved alot of time recently when we did something similar by running a 
separate virtual server on a port other than 80 on our web server.

We copied over all of the contents/structure of our live server to this 
test port, did our redesign, then copied the updated site back over to 
live.  For various reasons I chose to copy it back one subdirectory at a 
time, but it still took only a few minutes to make it happen when we were 
ready.

I've been fortunate to have an intern, a card carrying MLS libn. who has 
come back to school to get a computer science degree.  He did a thorough 
inventory, file by file and directory by directory for me first, which 
sped things up and helped me to delete a bunch of stuff that had crept in 
over the years.  And we have a relatively modest sized site.

John Creech, Systems Librarian
Brooks Library, Central Washington University