[thelist] Funny Friday web site =)

Brian Cummiskey Brian at hondaswap.com
Fri Jan 30 09:30:21 CST 2004


Well, it's Friday, and I'm in a good mood.  Hope you all are the same.

Stumbled on a funny site today.

http://home1.gte.net/racesale/

This site employs NetscapeR3.0, and MicroSoftR IE 3.0 enhancements.

Ohh yeah =)
Gotta love sites that haven't been updated in years.


And to keep things legit for the list- here's a tip =)

<tip author="Brian Cummiskey" type="Making the Jump from Static to
Data(base)-driven Design">
Keeping up with a static (straight html) site starts to become a tedious
task.  It becomes even more of a task as the site gets bigger.  Don't
hold off any longer.  The longer you wait, the more code you're going to
have to translate in the future.

Php is by far the most popular language to get started with.  With wide
hosting support, free software, and a huge online manual for php,
apache, and mysql, it's a great option and very powerful.

If you're thinking about making the change, here's a good way to get
started.

First, read the manuals and get a feel for the languages.
Next, arrange your content by category, for example, "articles".
Instead of having article1.html, article2.html and so on, make one file
called articles.php.
Insert the text of each article into a mysql database with a unique ID
field, called a primary key.
Now, all your content will form to one template, articles.php, in which,
it will "select" the text of the article ou wish to display, such as
articles.php?articleid=1.
When the time comes to update your layout, you have 1 file to change,
not 10, or even hundreds.
Using CSS, you can even take this a step further if you so desire,  by
controling the layout of articles.php from a linked CSS file.
</tip>




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