Any good techniques for...

User 192897 Photo


Registered User
325 posts

I am using VSD to create a website for a community type organization and I want to make availble to the members meeting minutes and other dated type materials. I do not want to be personally involved in loading up meeting minutes/documents every week and having to change VSD to point to a new document. It's a maintenace headache for sure.

Ideally i would want the secretary to load them to server and the website to automatically display the available dated meeting information or other pertinent documents. Something like the below

Meeting Minutes - 1/3/10
Meeting Minutes - 2/4/10
Charter - 3/1/10

Is there a way to list the contents of a directory or other technique so i dont have to get invovled every time something is loaded up to the server?

Thanks in advance
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User 38401 Photo


Senior Advisor
10,951 posts

This might be a crude workaround for you george, and someone else may have a more "proper" way to do this, but...

Usually if you have a directory on your server that has no index page (html or php) if you go to that address it will typically give you a listing of the contents of that directory.

With that in mind, if you were to create a directory on the server specifically to hold just these documents and put the link on the site to that exact location where those documents are, it will usually show a page with the contents of that directory in links. This would allow the secretary or whoever does this to upload pages to that exact location and they would show automatically.

The downside of this technique, if you will, is that it is a blank white page that opens, you cannot style it. The risk is we'd have to get some feedback from others to know if this works with all browsers and versions as that part I don't know. I think so... but...

This is a typical thing when you put images in a directory where people (like me) put a blank index.html page in the directory with them so that these list type pages aren't accessible. So I'm just using reverse logic here to say remove that page or make a directory without one basically, to get the list instead of hide it :)
User 271657 Photo


Ambassador
3,816 posts

Would the Flash Blog work for this? So the organization could make the updates themselves in the blog program then FTP to the site? I'm not familiar with the CC Blog software, but it looks like one scrolls backwards/forwards through it to find posts, rather than having a list of articles along the side (like Wordpress). So might not be ideal for finding previous month's notes.
Or maybe use an I-frame linked to a sub-directory containing a multi-page PDF file? So one would just keeping adding pages for each month's notes into the same PDF, then upload to the sub-directory? Maybe that could be made searchable, or have a list of links (Jan, Feb...) on the page next to the I-frame?

I'm interested in what you come up with, because I'm trying to find an easy way to do something similar (with a newsletter), and I don't want a Wordpress site.
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User 364143 Photo


Guest
5,410 posts

If I understood you correctly, every blog entry has to be made through the CC blog application and then the whole thing has to be again FTP'd up to the server. It's not a true blog like WordPress. It is a Flash based system that mimics a blog. I don’t see how an I-frame will help you get anything else out of the system.
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User 271657 Photo


Ambassador
3,816 posts

I meant either a blog to display the information or an I-frame to display the uploaded files, not the two things used together :P Sorry that was confusing!
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