I'm working on a site to help students with ACT prep, and I want to have a page where I can post explanations to questions that people submit. I want to be able to put a few tags on each post so that site visitors can click on or search whatever's relevant for them in the archives ("semicolons", "geometry", etc.) and all the relevant posts will come up, blog style. I'm very new to this, though, and I don't know how to do it or even what to search - when I search for tags I keep getting SEO recommendations, and that doesn't seem like the right thing.
Here's a solution (but it's not great)
It might be the only way to make what you want happen with a static HTML site.
You could, by hand, create pages that you fill with links to all of the posts that fit a certain category or "tag". For example, you could make a page that has links to all of your posts concerning geometry. Lets call this your archive page for geometry.
Then, when you include tags in a post, you would make each tag link to it's corresponding archive page.
Why do I say its not the best solution?
Virtually every blog that you see has a "back end" with a database that stores posts. When someone comes to your website and looks at a post, that posts data is inserted into a template and displayed to the user. You do not have to re-write the entire web page every time. Thing like the header, sidebar, footer, main page background etc are all in a template.
Having a database also lets you search the database and return relevant results. And a blog with a back end will typically let you write rules (or have them already written) that say, when you add a "tag" to a post, a link to that post should be automatically added to an archive page etc.
As far as I can tell you don't have database, so you'll just be linking static HTML pages. That means that every time you make a new post, you'll have to add a link to all of it's relevant archive pages by hand. Maybe you don't mind that now, but eventually it will be a nightmare to maintain.
I would strongly encourage you to look into a blogging platform like Wordpress to make your site. It will be more complicated to learn at first, but technology that's meant to do what you want it to do will ultimately be easier to use and maintain than technology that's simply meant to mark up a page.
Related
I'm sorry I do not know how to word that title better. I have tried searching google but my terminology isn't helping my results.
Let me explain the context. When you're on a news website or blog and you're on their homepage like: www.homepage.co.uk/ and then you click an article it will go somewhere like this: www.homepage.co.uk/2017/article/ how do they make the 2017 appear? because if you remove the /article/ from the url it takes you to an archive of all the links in that year? I don't understand, is there a process to this?
When I click a link in my website it goes to: www.website.co.uk/link
I want to be able to have that 2017/link/ in the url so they can find the archive of that year just like on their websites?
How do I do this?
I am sorry if I am not explaining this very well.
I understand changing my filenames to : "2017/article.html" might work but I do not believe that is the correct way of doing it?
Thanks a lot for your time and suggestions!
You're asking about a couple of things: one is the taxonomy of the site. Taxonomy, if you don't know, is the "shape" of or how your site is organized. News sites, for instance, are usually organized by date and perhaps topic (Health and Leisure, Politics, Entertainment, etc.). The other aspect of your question is regarding what you might call RESful "hacking" of URLs. One of the tenents of REST is that URLS (uri, to be accurate) are supposed to be hackable. A news site might have /2017/10/10 to display all articles for Oct 10. Maybe you remove the last "10", and get all the articles for October so far. If you are not using a site platform that does this for you, you will have to maintain that taxonomy yourself, and manually write all the links. Systems such as Drupal and Joomla, among others, will translate your taxonomy into automatically-maintained links. In editing a page on one of these platforms, you typically only refer to the system's internal name of the page (could be a shortened version of the article's title in the above example), and the underlying engine takes care of reconstructing the URL for you (in case the page moves, or its tags/taxonomy changes).
This is a big topic, and I encourage you to do some further reading:
http://searchcontentmanagement.techtarget.com/feature/Building-a-website-taxonomy-in-eight-steps
https://www.drupal.org/docs/7/organizing-content-with-taxonomies/organizing-content-with-taxonomies
I'm creating a Shopify store for a client who does not obviously know coding. He will need to update content on the website (and I have coded some pages with certain layouts (in the html part of the content) so when he types his content it often breaks our design)
As an alternative solution, I'm thinking of using the blog feature.
I know Shopify lets us create a page with only a certain blog, but what it does is show up in the URL - as a ...blog/cocktails.
That is not good for the end user, because I merely want it to be a page that calls the blog articles from this blog. I'm unable to find a way to do it.
I tried replacing blog.content with blog['cocktail'].content and etc..
but it didn't do anything.
Alternatively are there any suggestions how you can design a page and let clients add their own content just by typing (for instances where its a list of recipes for example)?
I think it would be best to create a custom page template same as blog page.
It will solve your all problems(i think) because first your url problem will be solved by it user has to just assign a template from backend.
Second one most important user can update its content from backend and it will not disturb your html.
If you still have problems just customise html and css.
I hope it will help you.
By "dynamic links", I mean a list of links that will constantly be updated.
To illustrate my question, I have a website that I am constantly writing new articles for. I currently have about 10 articles. If someone is to read article #5, there is a list of links to all 10 articles in the right panel of the page. As I update the site, and article #1 becomes out of date, I'd like to replace article #1 with article #11. Rather than updating the links within every article (so 10 times), is there a way to update the links once and have them all update simultaneously to every page?? Could I create an iframe for this??
Thanks for any and all help!
What's your goal? Do you want to learn to be a web developer? Or are you mostly concerned with getting your articles published?
If you want to be a web developer, I'd recommend steering clear of large CMS system like Wordpress or Drupal. Those are great products. But you want to learn the basics first. I think starting a PHP tutorial is the way to go.
If you just want to publish your articles, I'd recommend you find a nice place to create a blog. There are so many to choose from. It all depends on how much you want to spend.
Feel free to ask follow up questions. Web development sounds simple. But it's really a complex topic. I can't imagine what is must be like starting out these days with so many choices and competing technologies.
One way to do it would be to use Server-side includes. (Wikipedia) They work like this:
<!--#include file="some-content.html" -->
or
<!--#include virtual="some-folder/some-content.html" -->
The difference is file="" finds a file relative to the current page, whereas virtual="" finds it from the domain root. Either way, this method can use any type of regular text file as a source. The actual addition of the content is done by the server (hence the name) so its contents will be parsed as regular HTML and all CSS will apply to it as if the file were part of your page. I don't know about compatibility with different hosts, but if your web server supports it, this is probably the easiest way to go.
This is a rephrasing of my original question https://stackoverflow.com/questions/14516983/google-sites-trying-to-script-announcements-page-on-steroids:
I've been looking into ways to make subpages of a parent page appear in a grid like "articles" on the home page of my Google Site — like on a Joomla home page and almost like a standard "Announcements" template, except:
The articles should appear in a configurable order, not chronologically (or alphabetically).
The first two articles should be displayed full-width and the ones beneath in two columns.
All articles will contain one or more images, and at least the first one should be displayed.
The timestamp and author of each subpage/article shouldn't be displayed.
At the moment I don't care if everything except the ordering is hardcoded, but ideally there should be a place to input prefs like the number of articles displayed, image size, snippet length, css styling etc.
My progress so far:
I tried using an iframe with an outside-hosted Javascript (using google.feeds.Feed) that pulls the RSS feed from the "Announcements" template, but I can't configure the order of the articles. One possibility would be to have a number at the beginning of every subpage title and parse it, but it's going to mess up with time and the number would also be visible on the standalone article page. Or could the number be hidden with Javascript?
I tried making a spreadsheet with a row for each article with columns "OrderId", "Title", "Content", "Image" and process and format the data with a Google App Script (using createHTML and createImage), but a) there doesn't seem to be a way to get a spreadsheet image to show up inside the webapp and b) these articles are not "real" pages that can be linked to easily on the menus.
This feature would be super-useful for lots of sites, and to me it just seems odd that it isn't a standard gadget (edit: or template). Ideas, anyone?
I don't know if this is helpful, but I wanted something similar and used the RSS XML announcements feed within a Google Gadget embedded into my sites page
Example gadget / site:
http://hosting.gmodules.com/ig/gadgets/file/105840169337292240573/CBC_news_v3_1.xml
http://www.cambridgebridgeclub.org
It is badly written, messy and I'm sure someone could do better than me, but it seems to work fairly reliably. The xml seems to have all the necessary data to be able to chop up articles, and I seem to remember it has image urls as well, so can play with them (although not implemented in my gadget).
Apologies if I am missing the point. I agree with your feature request - it would be great not to have to get so low-level to implement stuff like this in sites....
I have a simple html/css-only static website on which I would like to add a blog. Comments and RSS aren't necessary.
Now, how do I do that, without having to write all my entries in pure html?
My website consists of a vertical menu and an area to the right of it, where all the content goes on each page. I would like a blog inside that area on the blog page, so a blog on a separate page with its own layout is not what I'm looking for.
Googling this doesn't really help me much since the majority of the hits are on sites offering blog services.
Thanks in advance, I hope I'm not being too difficult. Please leave some feedback on my question if you think there are things I should have tried out before asking.
If i understand what you want the answer is that ist is not possible in pure html and css. With only Html and css you can not make a blog (if you dont want to edit the source everytime you write an entry and have to make a new file for each entry and so on).
You need some code (php or so) that is able to store and load the entrys into your site.
Html and css are not meant to make things working. With Html you define the elements so that they are structed and then with css you "style" your work. But for the task of a blog (i think you want an editor for the text on the site, the ability to edit, delete, more than one site and so on) you need something like php or aps.net that is able to "interact".