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September 10, 2003
Wednesday Workaday
Not much going on over in the Seto Shack. As an update to the never ending list of domestic things to do: I finished painting the interior of the front house and am now working on cleaning it from top to bottom. I hope to be able to get it rented in about a month or two. In our back house, where we live, the bathroom upstairs is still waiting for the plumber to schedule work on replacing the leaking shower. It won't get scheduled for at least a couple more weeks and in the mean time, we will have to use the shower in the front house since the shower downstairs is also acting up.
As the number of pages on our intranet site at work has increased, an easy way of getting to pages became critical to its use. We decided to attack the problem with three different tools. The first was to create a "Yahoo" style index page that listed the various major categories of what the web site has. By doing this, you can get to where you want in one to at the most three clicks. The second tool was to create an index, like you have in the back of a book. Using the index will get you to any page in no more than two clicks, and for the most part, in one click. The last tool was to create a site map.
While the person who created the index was willing to code and maintain it by hand, I wanted to find something easier for the site map. I first tried to find an open source solution but whatever I found seemed to be keyed to running on *nix and Perl/Python. Being that our server runs Windows and IIS, all would not work without substantial editing. By the way, if someone says you can convert a non-trivial Perl program written for Unix to Windows with minimal changes, run as fast as you can away from this person because they are clearly mentally ill and don't know what they are talking about and have never actually done what they say can be easily done. This is especially true when it comes to dealing with how the two operating systems represent drives, directories, and even forward or back slashes. They are just not compatible and I've never seen anyone come up with a How-To that lists all the differences and how to program around them.
Being that as it may, I ended up buying a rather expensive program, for what it does, called SiteXpert (see it here). It costs $65USD and runs on Windows. You can point it at a page and it will spider the links on the page creating a site map with very little work on your part. Note this is different from a program that just lists the HTML pages linked to another. SiteXpert will follow all links and display said links in a hierarchical display. This is critical to us because we have pages that have links to Adobe PDF files. We want these files listed on the site map. Yet most site map programs ignore links to all binary files such as, but not limited to, pdfs and doc files. Why that is so I don't know but it appears to be almost universal.
So, if you need a Windows program that spiders all types of links, this may be the one for you.
Aloha!
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