Gorilla Web Tips

June 19, 2003 | 4 Comments

With the launch of my new site I’ve also launched a semi-regular column called Gorilla Web Tips. My goal with this is just to have a space to write about lessons learned, best practices and well, Web tips. These will mostly be pretty low level and as with most things Web are just guidelines based on the way I see things and my experience.

This weeks tip, News and Featured Content, talks in general about ways to handle regular news updates and features that most often appear on a site’s homepage.

Enjoy.

Filed under: Web General

Comments

1. Dave S. said:

Great introductory article, Keith. You’ve nicely summed up a lot of things I intuitively know but never seem to be able to verbalize.

Posted on June 20, 2003 09:38 AM | #

2. john said:

Very nice Keith - looking forward to more.

Question for you - in your experience how have non-bloggers responded to the topic of permalinks in your intranet environment? Do you use the same model you use here, “Permanent Link,” or have you not included that at all? As you know the default MT templates use the timestamp for the link, which is totally non-intuitive, many sites use a link symbol of some kind which in my opinion is equally non-intuitive, particularly for people who don’t understand weblogs. Your approach seems like a good one and I’m just curious how you handle it at work and if people understand what it means and how to use them.

Cheers

Posted on June 21, 2003 03:40 AM | #

3. Keith said:

John, what we did was change the homepage template in movable type so that the title of the entry is the only thing that displays and that title is linked to the “Permanent Link”.

This is fairly easy to do - you just create an href pointing to the archive folder and use the MTEntryID tag to get it to link to the full article.

In essence, on the homepage where the news items reside, there is just a title with a link, so there is no perma link as such - just a list of links that roll off in time.

We’re still working out a better solution to archiving, but for now this seems to work well.

Posted on June 23, 2003 11:08 AM | #