Updating a 1000 page website

without using Server Side Includes

[Benj]

Hi guys, I was wondering how do some of you update 1000 page websites without using SSI? Also assume you're working remotely from your server so everytime you change a page you have to upload it.

Lets say you have a navigation bar on the left side of every page and another navigation bar on the bottom of every page. Normally you would use Server Side Includes for each one. But say you didn't want to use SSI so that way you can free up server resources.

Currently I'm using Dreamweaver and I know I can use Dreamweaver's Libraries to achieve this but then I'll have to upload all 1000 pages everytime I make a little change to one of the libraries.

How do some of you do it?

[Drastic]

The only thing I know of besides using SSI is to run an extended find-and-replace across all the files locally. But, they would still need to be uploaded.

Don't know of anything you can do across multiple files server-side. (Not sure I would want to try that, anyway.)

[msgraph]

Haven't tested this out yet but it looks like it could be useful for performing find and replace on server-side files.

Recursive Find and Replace

info here [unimelb.edu.au]

[rcjordan]

>Lets say you have a navigation bar on the left side of every page and another navigation bar on the bottom of every page.

I'm doing exactly this using external .js files.

[knighty]

you could always use frames ;)

(extremely big grin)

[knighty]

RC,

How do you use external JS files for navigation?

[rcjordan]

>external JS files for navigation

I use document.write to create text navigation links or even drop-downs as a function in the external js file. The web pages themselves just call the function, so they never change. To update the links or add a seasonal message, I just modify the js file once and that's it.

Note that there are disadvantages to doing this, notably a loss of traffic due to some having javascript turned off AND spiders do not follow js links.

[knighty]

I never thought using document.write for nav bars. Thats a pretty cool idea.

[rcjordan]

I actually write a series of nav bars in different external js files, some for site-wide or global, another for the category (regional), and another for small subsets of pages that belong in a logical group (local). In the header, I call two js files, the global and the regional/local. Then, depending on where I am in the site, I mix and match nav bars -works great. The matrix that you can achieve with 60 nav files is pretty staggering.

<added>
This method also lets you navigate multiple domains or even servers.

[Benj]

Thanks guys. It looks like I'm stuck using SSI. I would love to use frames but the search engines don't index frames, darnit, darnit, darnit - lazy bums. Frames are awesome for using with websites. I once created a website using frames that looked like an open book. You would surf the inside page of the book.

I've thought about using external js files to do the navigation but I don't want to lose traffic and have big sections of my website blank because someone has it turned off.

So I guess all static websites out there use SSI?

[rcjordan]

>So I guess all static websites out there use SSI?

Apparently many of them are. I'm planning on switching to it myself over the next year or so because of the SEO benefits.

Some sites are using scripts to build static pages from a database and templates.