DaveNet: Monday, April 28, 1997; by Dave Winer.

New Technology for Scripting News

It's getting close to the end of the month, and a roll-over on the Scripting News page.

It's always bothered me that it gets so full towards the end of the month, and then becomes empty at the beginning of the next month.

So, I changed the way the home page works, and also build a smoother editing system for the home page.

Ten days of news, every day of the month

The home page now displays news for the last ten days. The end of a month isn't significant. If I take time off, that doesn't count -- so it's the last ten days with any news.

All news is archived, one page per month, there's a pointer to the archive page at the bottom of the Scripting News. As the month goes by this page fills up.

New editing system

To make this work, I start a new outline every day. Naturally I wrote a set of scripts to manage this system. They're organized into years and then months. The home page, at user.websites.home.default, is a script. It concatenates the text from the last ten days and flows it thru the normal scripting.com template.

If you're a power webmaster, you might want to take a look at how I did it. I've released the source code, user.websites.home, on the Fat Pages site.

Mon, Apr 28, 1997 at 11:25:10 AM by DW