I'm developing an encyclopedia-type site, of sorts. Essentially the site contains pages for words, definitions, concepts, and blog posts, and I intend to add a new page/post every week or so. I currently have about 40 HTML pages for each post. Previously I had been publishing a repository of the site to Github Pages, but recently I made the decision to host my website through Netlify. So far, I've enjoyed Netlify's features and it has improved my development process pretty well.
However, my website remains static. To be clear, I haven't created the site's files with a static site generator such as Next.js or Jekyll. I wanted the project to be a practice for hard-coding. The only files in the directory currently are HTML, CSS, and JS files (along with git attributes and things like icons and fonts) I've looked through Netlify's web applications and functions sections, however, nothing that I've found really hits the mark, whether it's because I'm a new user to Netlify, or because I don't necessarily have much experience in site indexing and/or back-end applications.
My question is, how can I implement a search bar and a title search functionality to the homepage of my static site? This would be for the process of viewers to easily find any specific post of mine once visiting. I would want the search bar to ONLY search the title of each html file (at least for now) in a designated folder I have for posts. Additional questions would be which, if any, web apps should I use to accomplish this, and should I consider changing the process of which I develop and host the site to accommodate for these?
Look at Lunr.js / ElasticLunr.js. Both allow you to create an index as a file and provide Javascript access that can be embedded in your page.
I'm currently working through that process now.
I think as you are not using database you can't have search functionality within the application. but you can google search within your website.
Check this out.
https://cse.google.com/cse/
I have seen this extension in some urls and I would like to know what they are used for.
It seems odd, but I couldn't find any information about them. I think they are specific for some plug-in.
It seems to be connected to 'Share This'-buttons on the websites.
I found this page which gives a quite comprehensive explanation:
This tag is mainly developed for tracking the URL sharing on various Social Networks, so every time anyone copies your blog content there he gets the URL ending with #sthash and extension with .dpuf or .dpbs
I have been asked to edit some content on a website built with TYPO3. I have no knowledge whatsoever of TYPO3 - in fact, I had never heard of it before. I build websites from scratch with html & CSS, and know very little about sites built via CMS platforms.
I downloaded the entire site in question in order to edit various parts of content locally, only to find out that it was built entirely with this particular CMS and that I understand NOTHING about the site structure !!! I can't even locate the main index.html / index.php file nor any main CSS files....
Can anyone who understands both the TYPO3 system and basic html & CSS please enlighten me ?
Thanks !
To edit content, you'll need a login to the Typo3 backend. The login is usually at www.example.com/typo3. Ask the site owner for an account.
Once logged in, editing page content should be relatively intuitive. You can browse the site tree and edit individual content elements. There are many basic tutorials out there, like this one for example. Changes to the layout are much more tricky.
TYPO3 stores content in the database, CSS you can find easily checking its path with the browser...
Anyway, sorry to say that but... leave it, TYPO3 is very complicated system and you can cause fatal damages which you won't be able to revert.
There are many websites out there selling HTML templates to use for your own website.
I've bought many web templates in the past, but it just dawned on me;
Most of them offer full previews of the websites they are selling - essentially offering the product for free, since one can just use "View Source Code" and copy-paste the HTML, CSS, JS, et al. into their own program.
I just tried it out myself with this theme from Themeforest and I was able to copy most of the site from the preview (some parts are a bit messy).
My question is: are there functionalities that are impossible to get without buying the website, or is it all just essentially running on the honor system?
Any PHP site you cannot copy the PHP code behind it (or any kind of server-side code) which means that contact forms, newsletter subscriptions etc will not work unless you write your own PHP code for them, however everything else works pretty much fine. It is equivalent of downloading something over a torrent or similar. It is illegal, and not to mention unfair to the developers that have spent time creating the template.
If you will just manually copy and not buying the template from themeforest or other template sites, you won't get any technical support from author and any succeeding updates from the template. I guess it's also a form of piracy.
So, buying premium templates is beneficial to you and to your clients.
Like Benedict Lewis said, you're just copying the static HTML and none of the server side code. You wouldn't be able to use this is WordPress (or whatever CMS the theme is made for). You'd have to manually create new pages, edit them, and and upload them to your site, which is a pain.
Plus you're stealing someone's work which may be copyrighted.
Although I've done programming, I'm not a programmer. I've recently agreed to coordinate getting a Website up for a club. The resources are--me, who has done Web content maintenance (putting content into HTML and ColdFusion templates via a gatekeeper to the site itself; doing simple HTML and XML coding); a serious Web developer who does database programming, ColdFusion, etc., and talks way over the heads of the rest of us; two designers who use Dreamweaver; the guy who created the original (and now badly broken) site in Front Page and wants to use Expression Web; and assorted other club members who are even less technically inclined.
What we need up first is some text and graphics (a gorgeous design has been created in Dreamweaver), some links (including to existing PDF newsletters for download), and maybe hooking up an existing Blogspot blog. Later (or earlier if it's not hard), we may add mouseover menus to the links, a gallery, a calendar, a few Mapquest hotlinks, and so on.
My question--First, is there any real problem with sticking with HTML and jpegs for the initial site? Second, for the "later" part of the site development, what's the simplest we can go with? Third, are there costs in doing this the simple way that will make us regret it down the road? Also, is there a good site/resource where I can learn more about this from a newbie perspective?
If you don't require any dynamic content, heck, if you don't plan on editing the content more than once a week, I'd say stick to basic HTML.
Later, you'd probably want a basic, no-fuss and easily installable CMS. The brand really depends on the platform (most likely PHP/Rails/ASP), but most of them can be found by typing " CMS" into Google. Try prefixing it with "free" or "open source" if you want.
I'm pretty sure you can do all this for absolutely free. Most PHP and Ruby CMS's are free and web hosting is free/extremely cheap if you're not demanding.
And last/best tip: Find someone who has done this before, preferably more than once. He'll probably set you up so you never have to look at anything more complicated than a WYSIWYG editor.
Plain old HTML is fine, just as long as you don't use tags like blink and marquee.
I personally love tools like CityDesk.
And I'm not just plugging Joel. (There are others out there in this class I'm sure.) The point is they make making a static website very easy:
The structure is just a filesystem structure
pages have templates to consolidate formatting
all resources are contained in one file
easy and fast Preview and Publish functions
For a dynamic collaborative site, I would just install one of many open source CMSs available on shared hosting sites.
If you're familiar with html/javascript basics I'd look into a CMS - wordpress, drupal, joomla, nuke, etc. All of these are free. Very often your web hosting company will install one of these by default which takes all of the hard part out of your hands. Next is just learning to customize the system and there's tons of docs out there for any of those systems.
All that being said there is noting wrong with good old fashioned html.
In addition to some of the great content management systems already mentioned, consider cms made simple.
It makes it very easy to turn a static site into a content managed site (which sounds like exactly what you might need to do in the future), and the admin area is very easy to use. Our clients have found it much simpler to use than the likes of Joomla.
It's also free and open source.
Good luck!
There's no reason to not go with plain old HTML and JPGs if you don't know any server side scripting languages. Also, once you want to get more advanced, most cheap hosting services have tools that can be installed with one click, and provide things like blogs, photo galleries, bulletin boards (PHPBB), and even content management tools like Joomla.
I had the same problem myself, I was just looking for something really easy to smash together a website quickly. First I went with just plain old HTML, but then I realised a simple CMS would be better.
I went for Wordpress. Wordpress is mostly known as a blogging platform, but in my opinion it is really great as a deadly simple CMS as well.
why not simply use Google pages?
Here is an example of a website I did, takes about 2 hours, easy to maintain (not that I do (-: ) and FREE.
I think that suggesting you mess with HTML for what you need is crazy!
Plain HTML is great, gives you the most control. If you want to make updating a bit easier though, you could use SSI. Most servers have this enabled. It basically let's you attach one file to many pages.
For example, you could have your menu in navigation.html and every page would include this file. That way you wouldn't have to update this one file on every page each time you need to update.
<!--#include virtual="navigation.html" -->
I agree with the other commenters that a CMS might be useful to you, however as I see it, probably a solution like Webby might do it for you. It generates plain HTML pages based on Templates. Think about it as a "webpage preprocessor" which outputs plain HTML files. It has most of the advantages of using a server-based CMS, but without a lot of load on the server, and making it easy for you to change stuff on any of the templates you might use.
It's fine
Rails (or purchase / use a CMS)
Not unless you start becoming crazy-popular
It really depends on what you go with for 2. Rails has a plethora of tutorials on the net and any product you go with will have its own community etc.
To be perfectly honest though, if the dynamic part is someone elses blog and you move the gallery out into flikr you may find that you can actually live with large parts of it being static HTML for a very long time.
If a to Implement a website With User Profiles/Logins, Extensions, Gallery's etc s a Newbi then a CMS like Joomla, Etc are good , but Else if you presently have only Static Content then Its good to go with Good Old HTML, About JPEG , I though Presently Its better to use PNG or GIF as its Less Bulky.
Also About you Query About Shifting to Server Scripts , When you have Database Driven Material or When you have Other Things that Require Advanced Prog Languages , Just use PHP Scripts inside PHP , and Rename teh File as a PHP, Thats IT, No Loss to you HTML Data.....
Do Go Ahead and Launch you Site ......
Dude, you're talking about HTML, obviously you'll be styling your content with CSS. Wait till you run into IE issues and god forbid your client wants ie6 compatibility.
Go with the HTML for now, I'm sure you guys will hack it through. Our prayers are with you.
Personally, I'd never use JPEG images on a website, mainly because of three reasons:
JPEGs often contains artifacts.
Quality is often proportional
with filesize.
Does not support
alpha transparency.
That said, I'd recommend you to use PNGs for images since it's lossless and a 24-bit palette (meaning full colors + alpha transparency). The only quirk is that IE6 and below does not support native alpha for PNGs, however this could be resolved by running a javascript which would fix this issue.
As for designing a website, there's both pros and cons for this. I suggest you read through:
37 Signal's Why We Skip Photoshop
Jeff Croft's Why We Don't Skip Photoshop
As for newbie resources, I'd recommend you flip through the pages at W3 Schools.