[SGVLUG] Website Testing

David Lawyer dave at lafn.org
Wed Jul 20 15:40:55 PDT 2005


I've revised our website using vim to manulally convert the homepage
to linuxdoc-sgml and then put it thru the filter sgml2hmtl resulting
in the static webpage: http://www.lafn.org/~dave/sgvlug.html.
Suggestions welcome.  To see the linuxdoc-sgml markup look at
http://www.lafn.org/~dave/sgvlug.txt.  I've eliminated some of the
links.  We don't need a sitemap if the site is only a couple of
webpages and have a table of contents for each page.  The "Calendar of
Events" can be short and on the homepage.  Do we really need a Tools page?
One could mention tools used to create the site: "Edited html file
with vim editor over a ssh connection." To save bandwidth, there are
no images.

Regarding my last post.  I implied that one could maintain the
master copy of the sgvlug site on their home PC and then when they
edited it on their PC, have say rsync (ssh access) or sitecopy (ftp
access) update the real website (the server).  What's wrong (or right
??) with this is that only one person is updating the master copy of
the site on his home PC.  I mentioned that at least 2 people should
have access to the server.  Well, it would still work if only one of
these two people maintains the site and the other is just a backup.
If the maintainer falls behind, then the backup person could use ssh
and vim to edit it online (or get a copy of the site with say wget and
then edit the site offline, etc), but then the master copy on the PC
is out of sync.

But how is the maintainer to know that the backup person has modified
the site if the backup person fails to email the maintainer?  I don't
know about rsync but sitecopy will not overwrite a file on the server
that has been externally modified (via say ssh-vim).  It displays an
error message that the file has been externally modified and leaves it
alone unless you force it to overwrite.  So the maintainer would be
informed that someone else has modified the site.  Good.   It would be
nice to also know who modified it and when and I'm assuming that a CMS
would show that info.

So while a CMS might be nice, in the meantime, what about using vim
over ssh to edit the simplified html directly?  I'm expecting our old
site to be back online shortly so if you like my rendition (5kB for
fast download over slow (or fast-:) modems) of the site, it could just
be copied to our server for sgvlug.org.  I'm adverse to messing with
the html code and linuxdoc is too weak and simple to make a flashy
looking site.  But beauty is only skin deep.

			David Lawyer


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