your journal's skeleton
BY MATTHEW COBURN
Before you fire up FrontPage, summon Notepad, or start whatever program you use to write your journal, take out a pencil and a piece of paper.

Before you think up a name, or design your fancy page layouts, you should plan out the structure of your site the directories, file naming conventions, and the other nuts and bolts that will help you manage what will hopefully become a considerable collection amount files.

Otherwise, you run the risk of being like me, tearing your hair out, screaming to yourself, "Where is that damnable GIF? What directory is it in?" And believe me, that is no fun.

Just for your amusement (or my self-deprecation?), I'll use my site as a cautionary tale. I am in the midst of a redesign because, in its current state, it has become quite unmanageable.

My poor journal was quite a rash creation. I sat down one day with the need to vent a little spleen and 'geekboy' was born. I just sat down and started typing and by the time I finished I realized what a cathartic experience it was. So I whipped up a graphic to go with the page, created a fairly snazzy looking splash page and voila! a journal was born.

Not good. Not good at all. Below, the skeleton of two journals. The one on the left is my current setup, and the one I plan to implement is on the right.

Now, while the one on the right may look nice and simple, believe me, when you are looking for a particular file and you have to wade through 62 files (like the 62 files sitting in the oldgeek/archive folder), you'll be kicking yourself for not organizing your site better beforehand.

Plus, I have an img, images, and bin folders in my old design. Why? Damned if I know. All three contain graphics for the site, scanned photos, doodles and the like. But I never thought about how I was going to store them as I began, so they wound up spread all over the place.

With the new structure all my images for the site (navigation, splash page, etc.) will go into the image folder; the planned photo section will reside in the geek2 folder, with the actual photos living in the photos folder. And my style sheets will be referenced to the css folder, so I don't have an extra 20-30 lines of text in each file. (We'll cover CSS later on, I promise.)

Also, with the new structure, every entry will go in a folder for the month it was written in (01 through 12) which in turn resides in a folder that corresponds to the year in which it was written.

"What's the big deal about that?" you may ask. Well, for starters, you don't have to think up strange file names for your entries. Mine used to be gb-081098.html and that can get confusing. With the newer directory structure, the same file will simply be called 10.html and will rest in the 98/08 folder.

(As the turn of the century taught us, though, you might want to use 1999 instead of just 99 at least so that the directories will sort properly in a list.)

So before you take the plunge and start journaling, make sure you've got your swim trunks on (and that they're tied tightly), that it's been at least an hour since you've eaten, and... oh wait... my train of thought derailed there for a second.

What I meant to say was, get the map out or at least think about how you are going to organize the site before you get started. That way, six months down the line when you want to go back and modify things, you'll know where to find them.

I know that it's not as exciting as visiual design and slinging HTML, but it is just as important.

Matthew Coburn is a veteran contributor to Diarist.Net. He can be reached at .