Fresh Content with WebDAV and ADO
By Kent Tegels
Jakob Nielsen has long maintained a list of the "Top Ten Mistakes in Web Design" on his UseIt.com site. He recently updated the list and, not surprisingly, found that outdated information still ranks as a very severe problem. Understandably so: As difficult as it can be to create a site, it can be much more challenging to keep it current. Of course, there's not much that you can do automatically to create new content. Content creation is a time- and labor-consuming process. What you can do is alert your site's visitors when documents change. Change, in this case, could refer to an updated document or a completely new one.
There are lots of ways to inform visitors about new pages. For example, you could manually review all your content and maintain a page that displays a list of new and updated documents. But if you're like me, that isn't going to fit into your schedule until we move to a 27-hour day. If you're running Microsoft Internet Information Server (IIS) version 3.0 or later, you can coax this data out of the Index Server engine that comes with the Windows NT 4.0 Option Pack. There are a couple of drawbacks to that approach. First, it only works for IIS/Windows-based Web sites. Second, the Index Server has a few "gotchas" that you might want to avoid, including security holes and the occasional tendency to index out-of-date information.
So, what's the solution? I prefer using an Active Server Page (ASP) to interface with the Windows 2000 Internet Publishing Provider for ActiveX Data Objects (ADO).
