General discussion

  • Creator
    Topic
  • #2271845

    Easy Ways to Update Websites? (backend systems?)

    Locked

    by chien.alan ·

    Hey, I’m a relatively amateur web designer and I jsut joined techrepublic since it seemed to have a lot of pretty knowledgeable people running around.

    So, I was wondering, is there any easier way to update websites than to have to constantly change links? I’m trying to get a webpage up for a journal, sort of like science magazine or something. So if I had to change the current issue, is there a way for my links to automatically update when I upload the new issue to the server? I was thinking that this may be able to be done in Javascript or seomthing.

    Like I said, I’m realtively new to the whole html thing, and so I’ve really only learned html, some css, and a just enough javascript to understand it, though i don’t play around with it too much. So, can anyone help me or direct me to a helpful website? Maybe tell me another language that may be designed for just this type of thing?

    I talked with a few people I know, and one of them mentioned that this type of thing is called a backend system, but searches on google do not turn up anything, nor on tchrepublic either. So, anyone have advice?

All Comments

  • Author
    Replies
    • #2588989

      Easy ways to update web sites

      by craig herberg ·

      In reply to Easy Ways to Update Websites? (backend systems?)

      If I understand what you want to do, it should be fairly easy to do. You could write a javscript with a table of filenames, such as

      journal.july2007.html
      journal.august2007.html
      journal.september2007.html

      etc.

      Based on the date on the client’s computer, the script would display the appropriate link. There are two problems with this approach. First of all, the client has to have javascript enabled. Secondly, if the date on the client computer is wrong, the wrong link will be displayed. This DOES happen. Of course you could write a server-side script in Perl or PHP to accomplish this, but that is probably more than you want to tackle.

      A far simpler approach is: name your current journal something like currentjournal.html and always link to it. If you don’t need the earlier journal, your upload will just overwrite it. If you DO need to keep earlier ones on the web site, your upload process will involve renaming the prior journal, with the appropriate date on it, then uploading the new currentjournal.html

      I hope this helps.

      Craig Herberg
      http://info-safety.com

Viewing 0 reply threads