I recently took over the management of a website that has nearly 3,000 html pages and around 500 images. The problem is that this site has been created over several years and several other web designers. Each designer apparently left the previous designers files on the site whenever they made a design change. The last designer had been adding pages to his design version for several years. It would appear that they all used MS FrontPage.
Now I’m faced with a site that has about 5,000 files and no good way to determine what files are OK to delete from the webserver without messing up what is already there. FrontPage has several reports in it, like the “Unlinked Files” report. But I discovered that it considers any file that is not listed inside an tag is considered “unlinked”. So an image file that is on a page using the tag is considered unlinked. Rendering that report useless to me.
I’ve looked at several different utilities that I found searching the web and there are very few that will give you a list of files that “for sure” are not being referenced by any of the currently active web pages. The one that had much promise descibed it’s process as parsing all the files that make up your site by parsing the site from the home page and it could even handle file references that are located inside .js files that are called from an html page. Then you give it your FTP login info and the starting website folder and it will gather a list of all files on the webserver. In the final step it compares the two lists and whatever files are not in both lists are a pretty safe bet are not being used by the current website.
However, after downloading this fairly old application and install it I was not able to make it work. 🙁
I can’t believe someone else hasn’t had this kind of problem and hopefully can share with me their solution. I can’t delete a file and then browse through 2,000 web pages to see if it was being used by the website. It would take me way too much time.
I can’t use FrontPage to publish the site elsewhere because FP will copy all files whether they are being used by the site or not.
I look forward to reading the responses to this request.
Thanks in advance to all.
