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Grex > Garage > #49: Grex.org top page and user web pages | |
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papa
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Grex.org top page and user web pages
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Jan 2 07:23 UTC 2018 |
Yesterday mijk made a post on party that brings up several issues that I
think deserve to be discussed here in the Garage conference. With
apologies to mijk for copying his party post:
> mijk: Hi guys, i just made a homepage here at Grex:
> http://grex.org/~mijk/ I was thinking of asking cross to add it to the
> list on the Grex webpage, but going through that list, i see none of
> us here (including cross) is listed. Having a browse through some of the
> pages, none of them were current, most were over ten years old, and
> some were not modified in nearly 'twenty' years. Along with cleaning up the
> rooms in party, so maybe some of us would make use of this feature in
> future, how about archiving some of the userpages so maybe the current
> userbase might put up a page (pointing to the gopher server ;) ) ?
I assume mijk is talking about the list of Grex user web pages at
http://grex.org/users.xhtml.
It is a bit of a graveyard, but I would prefer to keep the old user
pages on-line and accessible since Grex's long history is part of its
charm.
I propose that we improve the web site with two scripts.
1. Regenerate users.xhtml with a link to all user web sites with files
under their ~/public_html subdirectories. Run weekly or monthly. This
would ensure that new members' pages are linked from the Grex home
page in addition to the current vintage user pages.
2. Scan all user ~/public_html directory trees for recently added or
updated files and generate a list of links to the new content,
similar to the Daily Batch script I'm running on the gopherspace.
Could be run daily or weekly depending on the volume of new or
changed pages.
I completely agree that a link to Grex's gopherspace should be added to
the grex.org top page.
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| 20 responses total. |
butiki
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response 1 of 20:
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Jan 2 07:52 UTC 2018 |
Should be easy to script; I think I'll try to write one this evening.
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tfurrows
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response 2 of 20:
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Jan 2 20:42 UTC 2018 |
I second (or third or fourth, wherever I am in line) papa/mijk's notion. As
much as the internet is a mess, if that page is getting indexed, it can only
help grex to keep it current.
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cross
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response 3 of 20:
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Jan 4 04:43 UTC 2018 |
There's a script to generate users.xhtml; I can't remember the last time it
was run.
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papa
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response 4 of 20:
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Jan 4 06:52 UTC 2018 |
Would it be possible to put the users.xhmtl in a cron job. Running it once
a month would be enough to get new users' pages listed without too much wait.
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kentn
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response 5 of 20:
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Jan 5 00:58 UTC 2018 |
Grex has lots of things like this that need maintenance occasionally.
For those of us with lives, the time to do things like this is in short
supply. The script that Dan talks about generates the web page, then
we check it into subversion and from there update the web site. We
could cron job it, but it still needs to be updated in subversion.
Perhaps all that could be scripted.
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papa
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response 6 of 20:
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Jan 5 02:17 UTC 2018 |
I don't know of a reason why the subversion update couldn't be added as a
step to the page generation script, and then the whole thing automated with
cron.
Looking at the list, I have two questions:
1. In addition to the link from the user name to the user's web page, each
entry has a short text description, the user's full name, web site title,
organization name, etc. How does that description get set?
2. (Possibly related to 1.) The web page indicates that users can have their
pages added to the list by e-mailing webmaster@grex.org. Does anyone still
check that inbox to process page add requests?
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cross
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response 7 of 20:
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Jan 6 03:11 UTC 2018 |
It could be done from cron, just that no one has gotten around to it.
That's sad, but it's reality.
Hmm. I don't know who's reading webmaster email these days, if anyone.
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papa
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response 8 of 20:
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Jan 6 05:40 UTC 2018 |
How important is the opt-in feature of the current (non-functioning?) system
of having Grexers apply to webmaster to have their pages added to the list?
Writing a script to make a list of all user web sites on the system is easy,
but it would list each page whether or not user wants their site publicized.
The current system lists only the pages of members who have explicitly
indicated that they want their site listed.
If the opt-in is important, the current system could be improved by automating
it, either with a procmail job to handle requests e-mailed to webmaster, or
a shell script to allow users to add their sites to the list by themselves.
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