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DIARY-L FAQ: How do you structure your journal site? |
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From: Zach Garland <zachsmind@yahoo.com> I tried this once before but was asking for general suggestions and advice. Didn't want to get too detailed. In retaliation for that I was flamed in here. This time I'm going to be much more specific in what I'm ASKING we discuss in this particular thread. If you do not find an interest in this thread, please just disregard. If it interests you, please feel free to just email me personally or send to the mailing list. General description: Journal File Structure and Hierarchy Organization. Specific description:
How do YOU organize your journal's file structure? How do you wish you organized it? How can you plan for future versatility and spontaneity? I know about Frontier and CSS and stuff like that. Those are not presently options for me. I'll be doing all this manually through notepad. Please consider keeping that in mind when you respond. =) What else? Think that's it. If somehow this post still rubs you the wrong way, I've made every attempt to keep it flame-proof but you can still attack if you wish. From: Andrew Plumb <tekmage@plumb.org> Well, to cut a long story short, since my journalings are chronological, that is how I name my files: http://www.plumb.org/clburke/chronos/yyyymmdd.html I avoid 2-digit years like the plague - 2000 is only two years away. And the handy thing about this naming convention is that an alphabetical listing lists them chronologically: 19980218.html < 19980219.html < 19980220.html It adapts quite comfortably to an old DOS 8.3 naming convention too; yyymmdd.htm instead of .html. I wouldn't have problems with this until 9,999 approaches. :-) I store all my regular images in /images, and my little drawings in /drawings; I have a /sounds, but very few things in it. That's what I do. From: Wally Glenn <gwally@halcyon.com> I actually do mine like this: http://www.gwally.com/latestnews/9802/19.html If I am still around writing HTML in 100 years, I think I could figure out a way to change it. I suppose I could do /1998/02/19.html, but I do not see any real need to be that precise since I only break my journal and my advice column out in this fashion. From: Gabby Hon <raindog@iquest.net> Zach, my directory tree looks like this:
root
/fragment (my online journal)
/images (images for any splash or into pages)
/97 (all the 97 entries)
/images (where ALL the images for fragment 97 go)
/7
/8 (the months get their own folder by # - this is August's)
/11.html (each entry is numbered by day)
/98 (all the 98 entries)
/images (where ALL the images for fragment 98 go)
...and so on, like above
I have found this structure (borrowed from Justin Hall, http://www.links.net) works the best and is extremely flexible for redesigns - as long as you operate on a day/month/year format. if you don't organize your entries that way (say you prefer to go by entries that fall under quarter moons or something), then obviously it won't work so good. I used to make image folders in every month directory but that was insane and made my overall storage complex and unmanageable. I keep another folder, quickcam, inside my fragment folder where I put all my photos from the quickcam - even if i refer to a photo in an entry, but that's just for my own filing purposes. when i first learned to do web pages, i used justin hall's site as a bible and he stressed the importance of directories for keeping your site organized and manageable. through a lot of trial and error, i found out he's right. i would say keep your file names as short and easy to recall as possible, that way it makes it easy for someone to memorize the directory path to a particular entry. think about your site from your perspective as a user, Zach: what about the directory structures of other sites make it hard for you to find your way around? do you ever look up into the location bar of your browser and gasp at the hugely long URL? what have sites done to a) confuse the hell out of you and b) make it easy and pleasurable for you to visit and browse? it's all pretty easy, really. From: Andrew Plumb <tekmage@plumb.org> Hmmm... One of the primary reasons why I use the full date as the file name is to keep any references to other dates as simple as possible. If I want to make reference to 19971023.html from 19980220.html, all I need is an HREF="19981023.html" link. The second reason why is so that my 19980220.html entry "knows" it's own date, regardless of where I move it. As always, YMMV. From: The Turtle <turtle@fred.net>
Have a directory devoted to the journal. If you can't do that (if you're on a freebie site where you can't create directories) get a site you can dedicate to it. Images you use in the journal should be in that tree, not above in some other hierarchy, even if they somewhat overlap. This ensures that if you have to pick the whole thing up and move it to its own site or a new subdirectory, you can do so without major pain and sorrow.
Name it, or title it? Naming the file is pretty straightforward: by date. Titles are best left to whimsy and hallucination.
Use as few absolute URLs in the journal enties as you can. In general, references to other journal entries should all be relative. If you refer to some other part of your site, do so in a way that will make it easy for you to track down if you have to move the journal but not the rest of the site.
Maybe not a subdirectory for every month, but your mileage may vary. My structure is that "today" gets its own filename (always the same name, the contents change). Then each month gets compiled into one big file with internal anchors for navigation. Each month also gets its own "index" file, with a name similar to the month's entryfile.
Never seen anyone do it by season. Try organizing by shoe size or your dog's age.
Usually, but not always. Sometimes I'm lazy and just throw images into the same directory as the text. How did I organize it? See above. How did I *wish* I organized it? if I wished it, I'd have done it. Planning for spontaneity is a logical vortex and I'll step away from it before it sucks me in. One thing that I have is a CGI script that lets me enter stuff in a special password-controlled HTML form, and then it takes care of setting the fonts I like, the colors, etc. All I enter is HTML that's actually used within the entry. The nice thing about this script is that it also automatically produces a "today" entry, adds the entry to the bottom of the "this month" file and also updates the index. That used to be an incredible pain and I cannot imagine living without it. The one thing I want to write now is a thing that auto-archives past months' index files and entryfiles. I have to do that by hand every month. At least get something like WebEdit. Writing a complex website in NotePad is like writing a large commercial game in DEBUG, or for you non-DOS types, like painting the Mona Lisa in FatBits mode in MacPaint. Sure, you can do it, but... From: Wally Glenn <gwally@halcyon.com>
Start with something simple. If the site is nothing more than a place for the journal, then make the top level index or default page into the journal (intro) splash page. If I was doing this on Planet Wally, I would check to see what the default page is supposed to be named (in this case, default.html) so that the path to the first page would be http://www.gwally.com/default.html, but since the Web server re-directs entries to the default page, people can simply go to www.gwally.com and still get there. If you decide to make the site a multi-purpose site, You might want to put the journal into a folder named after your journal. In the case of Planet Wally, it is http://www.gwally.com/latestnews/.
Do what works for you and do not get too tied up in date codes unless you want to. Express yourself in the way you want to express yourself. It is a good plan to keep the names under 8 characters, but this is not as big of a deal anymore. If you want to use a date code, put entries into year or months and years like this: /1998/02/ for February, 1998, or /9802/ for the month of February, or 98feb, 1998/feb/, whatever you think looks neat. If you do not post daily, stick with 1998/0202.html for February 20th, 1998. For my Web site, I used http://www.gwally.com/latestnews/9802/19.html
Make the info relating to HTML in the pages relative as opposed to absolute. What I mean is, if you make the entire folder relative to the info in the folder, then it can be easily moved to another Web site. For instance, if you are referring to a page for February 19, 1998 from the default page, using my Web site as the example, you would make the path from the default page <A HREF="9802/19.html"> instead of <A HREF="http://www.gwally.com/latestnews/9802/19.html">.
If you post daily, I think it makes it easier to manage. If you post weekly or monthly, then you are only looking at maybe 50 posts and using the year code method like 1998/0219.html is going to be fine.
It is best to organize under the method you like. The only reason to use date codes is if you plan to do things like searches. It makes it a little easier. But if you do not plan on using .asp or a search engine, stick to what works for you, and what appeals to you. If you use descriptive terms like /deadofwinter/ springishere/ or /damncats/ it is more fun.
Again, is your site heavy on graphics? I prefer to stick all of the images in a separate folder, but if you have less than 40 items including pages, there is not a big need. Now if you plan to use the same graphics everywhere, it makes sense to have a central graphics folder within the directory where your journal is located. Using my site as an example, I have all of the header graphics for my journal in one central spot (http://www.gwally.com/latestnews/images/). For graphics that will be found all over Planet Wally, I place them in a folder at http://www.gwally.com/images/. This way if I choose to modify the graphic, I can do it globally from one spot. From: "Jeanne Lawrence" <jeannelawrence@hotmail.com> Because working with subdirectories isn't easy on Tripod, I have almost all my files in one directory, though I've moved some old entries to an "old" subdirectory. It was difficult but necessary. I don't break it down any further beyond that, and every day's entry is a number that represents the date, such as "980221.HTML" so that it sorts nicely. From: Sierra Kempster <darkmoon@calweb.com> I do the same thing... originally I named them "98.02.21.html" etc to make it easier for me to read, but when I moved my journal over to GeoCities it became difficult to upload since their ftp server won't take names with multiple dots in them. I kept it up for a while (ftp'ing the name without the dots, then going into the file manager and changing the filenames), but eventually I just started using the 980221.html format. From: Ray German I have never really understood why people use different directories for their journal related stuff. I can understand if you have more than one "site" on a server... like a directory for the journal, one for the Ray German fan page, etc... but putting different entries in different directories seems odd to me. I have everything in one big fat directory and I have yet to lose track of something. From: Tracing <alethea@ounce.com> I started out with all journal entries inside /tracing and images inside /tracing/images. I had no idea how long I would keep the journal up and that seemed to be the simplest. However, I quickly found that was a _big_ mistake as it became cumbersome. Furthermore, my naming method did not keep entries listed by date when they were listed alphabetically, which I now consider an important convenience (I used a 97aug10.html type naming system). So after the first calendar year, I switched to a /tracing/97jan/97jan4.html type system and, while you still don't get entries in chronological order when listed alphabetically, it was a lot less cumbersome. This year, though, I've switched to tracing/98/98jan/98jan01.html so you at least get the chronological listing within each month. That makes for a bit of a mouthful, but what I don't like about /98/jan/01 is that entries don't get unique file names. With the folder for each month is an /images folder for images specific to that month. I've started a second journal (of images) and have decided on an /too/9802/980216.html type of structure, again with an /images folder within each month folder (definitely necessary hear as there's an image per day). This is working out pretty well. So that's my story. A big recommendation I would make is that once you post an entry, don't move it. When I have changed filing methods, I've kept previous entries where they are. I consider it a courtesy to people who are kind enough to link to particular entries that you keep their link current. If you have to move a page, make sure they have a way of finding it from the old url. From: dreamwish <dreamwish@geocities.com> Yeah, directories would be nice, but since I'm a cheapskate on Geo, I can't create/use directories. You could spend $5 and get that GeoPlus option that would allow directories, but that might be better spent on purchasing a "real" ISP's web page. If I had directories, I'd do the yyyy/mm/ directory structure, but keep my current naming system of yyyymmdd.html. Clobbering files accidentally is not a nice thing. :) From: Danny McGuffin <qe@quackent.com> I personally put my images and all of the HTML pages into one directory called diary. The pages use to be named *month.html. Just recently I have gotten into making daily entries and do the typical dating technique of 022298.html for Feb 22, 1998, everything falls into a nice order From: "Doug Franklin" <nilknarf@atheist.com> Ever since I started, I've been using the YYMMDD.htm for the files, and I have piled them all into my /journal directory. I have several other directories for other stuff... /pix for grafix, /stuff for almost everything else. I have my index file in the root, plus a coupla other files, but other than that it's bare. I use CUTE FTP and it was a real pain getting into the /journal directory before I figgered out how to turn the auto-update off, now it's no problem at all. Also, with CUTE, you can choose how to do the directory sort, I have it set on date, so the last-updated files are topmost. This is handy for keeping track of what's done and what isn't... People seldom really have to go into the /journal directory, but it's got 400+ files. I don't know if it slows down or not, but I've not noticed any lag... From: Tracing <alethea@ounce.com> It's not so much losing track of something that's the problem. It's just that scrolling through hundreds of files before you get to index.html gets really old really fast. Plus I use Fetch to ftp and it can take a long time for it to download all the file names when you open a folder to add something to it. From: Wally Glenn <gwally@halcyon.com> It has been mentioned before, but my title is not "ass chewer" so lets see if we can pull together some really helpful information for everyone on this list. For my pages I use a /subject/datecode/entry.html approach and it seems to work well. I post frequently and it handles it just fine. My URL for "Lifestyle" is http://www.gwally.com/latestnews/9805/18.html. That takes you to my entry for May 18, 1998. My date code is set up with a two digit year code (98 for 1998) first which makes searching and any coding you do easier, a two digit month code (05 for May). So all of the posts for May, 1998 are in 9805. I break down my days into a two digit date code for that day. In this case 18.html. There is nothing that says this is the best approach, I simply find it works for me. It may not work well after 1999 because my next date code is 00, so it will not be higherarchical in order, but it will not repeat an actual year code until January, 2098, and I am not certain I will be maintainging my journal then. The other idea is to use a structure like /1998/05/18.html, or even /1998/0518.html. Of course, there is no reason why you cannot do something like /subject/spring98/entry.html. The most important thing is to create a system that works for you. Study these ideas and decide what works well for you and says you. Just because it works for me does not mean it will work for you. From: Danny McGuffin <mcguffin@mcguffin.org> I keep all of my entries in a folder labelled dates, the format for each entry is the typical daymonthyear.html (031898.html For example). I have run into problems when the year goes by and my 97 entries and my 98 entries have been mixed up together. To combat that, I created a folder of all of the years and put everything in the newwest year folder. I have also seen entries that start with the year which solves that problem also, so the newwest entry will be typically at either the top or the bottom of the upload list. |
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