Query for webgurus!



I've just done a website for a client.

The site basically consists of static HTML

pages with some effects in flash and windows media files.



The client wants to host the website on his own server, 

and so wants greater control over the site. 



At the moment he relies on me to update the "what's new" page

(it's updated regularly). I do this by cutting and pasting

the content in Dreamweaver.



Is there a way of giving this updating task to the client so that

he can do it himself easily?  



Maybe by constructing a little something in ASP/PHP/Java? Or not?



I would be grateful for any suggestions.

You could use the filesystemobject ( FSO), so long as the news they type 

in is in some format, and you have only one instance of some tag (<h5>?) 

in the news.htm file. From an asp page you read the text of the file into 

the FSO and then Do something to parse the file (maybe some other people 

could help with that) and just returns what's between say <h5> and </h5> 

or even use a comment to do it, <!-- news --><p>"Whatever text here"</p><!-

- news -->. Then you could write a line into the file, the line being what 

they typed into some form. Just a few thoughts, I have never actually done 

anything like this, but that would be one way to go. Another is the 

database thing, and have the news page just query a database, you could 

set up a form to enter the news items into the db. I haven't worked much 

with XML, but I am positive there is some way to use that with this, and 

it may be the best option, pointless to make a database for one thing, at 

least I think. 



Maybe some of the others have a comment or two that can help more.

Easiest way would be to use an include file.  You'll have to change the file

extension of the page to ASP to instruct the server to look for code to

parse, but you could allow the client to edit a text file on the web server

that will get "pulled" into your page when the server parses the INCLUDE

directive.



=================================

Kyle M. Burns, MCSD

ECommerce Technology Manager

Centra Credit Union

kburns@....

Thanks for the advice. I suppose it would also be possible to construct an 

admin.asp page or a small text editor app dedicated to the job of 

generating the text file.

Header and footer includes with database driven content is by far the

easiest and best way to go but if that is beyond you right now......



There are plenty of free utilities out there that you can use to edit pages

on your website.

Search for Donhey Manager or something similar and you might find what your

looking for.



Scott Reed