Editing a traditional web site is easy, all you have to do is edit the HTML files in EmEditor, get an FTP program, set up your server name, user name and password, and send the files to your web site.
However, you might want to change web pages on-the-fly, from work, from internet cafes, from places where you don't have all your software and web-site templates set up.
One method for doing this is to store all the text in text files, in a certain directory. When someone asks to see a page, your website takes that text file, puts it into your template, and displays it. When you want to add pages, you go to your 'update' page, type in the new text, supply a password, and it gets saved into the right directory. The very next visitor can now go to your website and see the new page. You don't even have to worry about your headers, footers, and page templates when you add files.
Another cool idea I saw on perl.com was that you simply email news articles to your website. If an email arrives with the correct password in the subject line, it gets posted to the website by a perl script.
Perhaps the most obvious way to enhance a web site is to allow your visitors to post their own comments on it. For a news site, you can have a "discuss this story" section where people can post their own responses. If you have an organisation (local government, campaign group etc) then what better way to get people involved than letting them post their own articles on the web site.
And for any web site, let your users have control of any section you'd like updated frequently. Many web sites allow you to add sites to their links list. You can either add them directly, or add them to a list where an administrator can approve them. If you let people add links directly to your site, make sure you implement an effective filter (anyone suggesting casinosonline.com gets added to your blacklist of IP addresses) and make sure you have an easy way of deleting the links.
Whatever your current project, you'll want to share files with people, and often you won't have a network area to use. If your team need to work from home, from abroad, etc. then file-sharing on a local network won't work so well. You can set up a simple file server on your website in PHP, (making sure to impose file-size limits) and give everyone PGPi to encrypt whatever is stored in that area.
In a similar vein, many university clubs, sports teams, and companies have photo galleries for their members. People have to email the photos to a webmaster, who puts them on the site as soon as they can be bothered.
Why not put an "add your photos" form at the bottom of each galley. A file upload button, and a few text fields asking for name, password, and caption, and PHP can handle putting the photo into your album.
A simple one, this. Every page of blibbleblobble.co.uk has a feedback form at the bottom of the page. If you fill it in, it gets stored in a text file next to the page name. That saves your users the bother of emailing you to give opinions or report minor faults, it gets you a lot more feedback on each page, and it means that people don't have to worry about giving out their email address.
Although not directly visible to the user, generating your own log files can be valuable in getting a site to work. For example, when someone searches your site and no matches are found, write down what they searched for in a log file, so that you can update your search engine next time. Have a look at where people came to your page on. If they all followed a link from download.com, then you can write a web page that puts your "Downloads" section at the top of the list.
If you want to know how to do any of the above tricks, have a look at PHP and Perl. There are plenty of commercial "content managers" out there which are expensive and inflexible by comparaison. Most web sites are run with Linnux, Apache, PHP, Perl, and mySQL anyway, which are all freeware open-source programs, and hence are worth using.
If you don't want to know how to do any of the above, but just want it done, email me to discuss a contract.
Many of the methods described above are at best 'vaguely-secure.' Anyone looking at the internet traffic between you and your website will see the password being sent as plain text, and will then be able to do any updates themselves.
Well, this is only the same as the emails you send every day, which all go over the internet as plain-text. Even famous web sites have emailed me my password as plain-text, free for anybody to read. However, most of the people reading this will not have their IP traffic scanned for passwords, and so long as you put restrictions on the size of files that can be uploaded to your web site, you shouldn't have a problem.
Always make stuff easy to delete - one option might be that anyone can delete something added in the last week, and after that only the administrator can delete it by typing ?password=mypassword in after the URL.
If you want an extra level of security, read some of the discussions at perl.com about embedding encryption modules in your web pages, checking the signatures of those who post files, and sending passwords using the site's public key. If you want dynamic updates of a major corporate site, then you're back to FTP and secure FTP, which was where we started the article.
Oliver White
