Automating Web-Site Maintenance Part 1
Utilities That Keep Your Web-Site Information Up to Date
By Paul Helinski
Bandwidth won't kill the World Wide Web, but production costs might. Dynamic, frequently refreshed content sells. But coding and linking that new content takes time and money, meaning that fresh content becomes stale before it reaches the site. Even the most successful sites can rarely pay for themselves today, and companies may be loath to pay for the increasing amount of Webmaster hours a dynamic site requires. As a result, dynamic sites fall behind, lose budgets, and eventually shut down.
Automation to the Rescue
The answer to this conundrum is automation. Site automation transforms a cost-benefit nightmare into a justifiable, worthy expense by relieving the Webmaster of his or her most repetitive and menial tasks.
This article is the first in a three-part series that presents a toolbox of CGI Perl programs that will heighten your efficiency and make your site more productive. All the programs are freely available from both WebTechniques.com (see "Source-Code Availablility") and the program developers, World Media Services.
This month, I'll present SiteWrapper, a tool that automates link updates and other common time-consuming tasks. An easy-to-use plug-in, SiteColors, extends SiteWrapper to change the look of your site on the fly. In Parts 2 and 3 of this series, I'll add statistics, automatic email utilities, and WebPost, which expands automation beyond the Webmaster to the actual generators of Web-destined content.
