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Why browse More Headlines via CGI?

 
 


nigelparry.net
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Aug 16, 2002, 11:26 PM

Post #1 of 5 (2600 views)
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Why browse More Headlines via CGI? Can't Post
On the feed index pages, the More Headlines link uses a CGI script to browse the older articles in that category?

Why not static links?

Nigel Parry
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Dave
Staff / Moderator


Aug 19, 2002, 12:06 AM

Post #2 of 5 (2567 views)
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Re: [nigelparry] Why browse More Headlines via CGI? [In reply to] Can't Post
It was the easiest and more versatile way to do it. The "more headlines" link actually just uses the search engine, which can let you specify how many results to show per page, where to start in the list, what template to use for output, etc. You can even narrow the search by date range, category, archive, or keyword if you want.

If we published a static page for each results page we'd need to publish a large number of them. In addition, each time a new article was added to the front of the list it would push everything down by one and everything would have to be republished adding additional overhead (2000 articles at 10 per page would be 200 static pages needing updating).

The other option would be to publish a long list of articles by some criteria such as category, or date range. For sites with a lot of articles this isn't optimal or very usable either and it forces people into a particular type of design. The search engine basically lets you pull up any results you could from the Advanced Search page and display them with any results template you want.

I know there's been some talk about making sure that pages buried deeper in the site get indexed by search engines. In the short term, we're going to post something that will generate a list of all the links from all categories that people can submit to search engines to make sure all the pages get hit.

We've been talking about a few ways to do this, I'm thinking we could just have a single static shtml page with a search engine include that used a custom template that only showed the links (from all categories, 99999 results per page).

Moving forward (I'm talking about future products and major upgrades here), it's unlikely that it will be possible to publish everything as static pages. It's nice to be able to do it for content that is requested a lot as it can really reduce the load on the server. But, with archiving, custom indexes, and (in future) sites that have tens of thousands of articles it won't always be feasible. Our plan for this is to have the programs output links that get indexed as static pages by the search engines. For example:

http://sitename/publish/archive.cgi/1234/

Eventually, we hope to have both options available. So you can publish all (or most all) static pages if you want or you can have them all generated dynamically but in a way that uses search engine friendly URLs.

The archiving that was recently added to Article Manager actually has a flag you can set to make use of this feature for links to archived articles (which are generated dynamically).

Anyway, I hope that answers your question. I went into extra detail because I know a number of people are interested in this topic (as are we). : )

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
 


nigelparry.net
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Aug 19, 2002, 7:56 AM

Post #3 of 5 (2557 views)
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Re: [Dave] Why browse More Headlines via CGI? [In reply to] Can't Post
Thanks Dave, this was very clear and the reason why you didn't do that in the software makes a lot of sense.

The problem from my point of view was that the SSI includes on the category indexes stop working after the first page.

Fortunately, as the CGI doesn't know how to call them, the server doesn't give an error, so if people don't mind the blank space after the first page, it's livable with for many people. However, that's underuse of screen real estate in many people's eyes.

As it stands, the generated latest headlines might work in space terms for some people (not those with more than 6-7 categories otherwise the right column gets very long).

And the latest headlines for that same category would work, although that's what people are already browsing, so it's somewhat redundant!

So there are in reality two solutions:

1) Don't put dynamic content on the index templates unless you are happy to see it disappear once people start clicking the "More Headlines" link.

2) Put static content in there, whether links, Amazon books, featured other sections, etc. I'll probably end up doing this. As we have many articles per category, this is the perfect place for "Editor's picks" from that category.

3) On the level of actually changing the software, there is one thing that could be done. If you allowed people to specify one template for the first page of the category/feed index and one for browsing, that would preserve the possibility of having dynamic content on the first pages of categories and something completely different on the ones browsed by the search engines. That might be too much complexity though.

Sometimes you don't get the solution you want, but the alternative is workable, and at least you know what you have to do. At least 50% of this is about moving on..... :-P

Nigel Parry
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(This post was edited by nigelparry on Aug 19, 2002, 8:09 AM)


Dave
Staff / Moderator


Aug 19, 2002, 10:01 AM

Post #4 of 5 (2550 views)
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Re: [nigelparry] Why browse More Headlines via CGI? [In reply to] Can't Post
So the problem is you have CGI scripts you want to include with SSI's and they're not showing up on the "more headlines" pages? Because you should be able to include static pages on both the index and the "more headlines" pages, except for the "more headlines" pages you need to use an "artman include" like this (in addition to an SSI):

<!-- template include : published_file.shtml -->

Let me know if it is in fact CGI scripts you want to use and I'll see if I can come up with a solution for you.

Quote


... If you allowed people to specify one template for the first page of the category/feed index and one for browsing ...


Try tacking this on to the end of the prev/next links: &template=index/mytemplate.html

I haven't tested it but it should let you do just that. Of course, make sure the template file you specify exists.

Dave Edis - Senior Developer
interactivetools.com
 


nigelparry.net
User

Aug 19, 2002, 10:16 AM

Post #5 of 5 (2548 views)
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Re: [Dave] Why browse More Headlines via CGI? [In reply to] Can't Post
No not a CGI, just a text file or whatever.

Your solution works. Thanks so much. This totally baked my noodle over the weekend.

All I'd add to it after testing is that you have to be careful using the paths, at least on my Apache server.

An include of file.html or file.txt in the same directory as the publish directory specified in Art Man works fine as you browse through the search script.

Absolute URLs eg.
Code
/file.html
don't work because ArtMan appears to be working on server paths, eg. yourloginname/www/then the root of your site. My guess is that if you included the entire server path, it would work.

Relative URLs, eg
Code
../file.html
seem to work fine.

This resolves http://www.interactivetools.com/forum/forum.cgi?post=1108 as well (which was the same question in another guise I realise). Great job. Thanks!

Nigel Parry
_____________________

For more information about Nigel Parry and nigelparry.net 
websites please see http://nigelparry.net

nigelparry.net: award-winning communications 
solutions for clients with something to say

Website & print design
Internet, public relations & media consulting