Perl for Web Site Management

Chapter 15. Generating Links

This chapter continues the example begun in Chapter 14, which describes a project I participated in that involved creating a template system for an elementary-school web site. At this point in the project, with a template system and a tool for automatically rebuilding pages when the template changed, students were able to begin creating the two types of pages that would make up most of the site:

• Personal pages for each participating student, with information about their favorite activities, their participation in the project, and so on

• Leader pages profiling local leaders in a variety of categories: school, government, business, and so on

This chapter describes the next stage in the project, in which I created a system to automatically generate links between the site’s pages.

The Docbase Concept

The approach I took to building this feature was heavily influenced by Jon Udell’s concept of a docbase . As described in his book Practical Internet Groupware, a docbase is something of a hybrid, having features of both a document collection and a database.

A document collection, from this point of view, is a largely freeform collection of information. Whatever relationships connect the various individual documents in the collection are apparent only to a human being, rather than being encoded in a way that can be understood by a computer. Most small web sites are document collections. As a side effect of their freeform nature, the links connecting the pages ...