Web site, SSI, SSH, and Windows SCP

[Roger R Dingledine <arma@mit.edu>]

Date: Tue, 30 Nov 1999 10:11:34 +0000 (GMT)
From: Andrew Wood <ivarch@ps.cus.umist.ac.uk>
To: independence-l@independence.seul.org
Subject: Web site, SSI, SSH, and Windows SCP

There has been lots of discussion (while I've been in bed, unfortunately ;)
about making the web site accessible to developers.

People have been complaining about the lack of a decent scp program for
Windows. Well, it just so happens that a while ago I made a little Zip file
containing Win32 binaries for ssh and scp - plus some batch files and a
little utility to make it easy to do port forwarding and stuff.

If anyone's interested, I can send them this Zip. Can't put it on a web
site, sorry ;-/

There is also a pretty good Windows ssh-capable terminal emulator called
PuTTY written by an acquaintance of mine. Don't think it does file transfer,
but it's useful anyway: http://www.chiark.greenend.org.uk/~sgtatham/putty.html

Moving on to the idea of using SSI for navigation bars etc - it's a case of
"nice idea, but". It's a nice idea but it will break on mirror servers that
can't do SSI (although you've said that's not a problem at the moment). It
is also difficult (IMO) to do much more than simple file inclusion so, for
instance, it's a pain to do a navigation bar with the current page in bold
or something.

A while ago I wrote a set of scripts and an auto-generating Makefile to
build my own website, and have also used it for a few clients when I was
doing freelance web design. It just uses GNU `make', `bash', and `m4' the
macro processor. No SSI or other server tricks needed.

For an example of what you can do with it, see my home page,
http://www.iskra.connectfree.co.uk/a/ - note the navigation bars - if you
ever get through to the page, that is (stupid free ISPs) ;)

It takes a bit of fiddling to set up, which I'm willing to do, but once it's
in place it's just a case of typing "make" after every change of the source
files. You could even have a cron job to run "make" every 15 minutes - it
does nothing if nothing needs doing - so developers only need to update the
source, they never need to run anything else.

- Andrew


On Mon, 29 Nov 1999, David Webster wrote:

> This is slightly more work than SSI, but not massively so, but that would
> probably be made up for if we got one extra person helping with the site.
> This script would require bash to run, but the pages could be edited
> without the script, just like normal pages.