Looking For A Website Scanner
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Our company website is a simple, static HTML design that has "grown" over the years from a PHP implementation on Linux to a .Net form on IIS. It has been massaged repeatedly using different tools, primarily by amateurs who know little of website design. I downloaded the source a year or so ago, with the intention of adding some new content and reorganizing it, but was completely floored by what I found. The last design go around was done by a front desk clerk with a copy of Web Expressions, and it's a mess. There are thousands of scripts, most never used, in hundreds of files. It looks to me as if she simply uploaded everything available, including all the canned material Microsoft provides with the pictures and verbiage I created years ago, and now it's almost impossible to determine what is used and what is just taking up space. What I'm looking for is a tool that I can run which will output a list of required resources called for by the visible pages, so that I can cull out everything else. Can someone point me to such a tool?
Will Rogers never met me.
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Our company website is a simple, static HTML design that has "grown" over the years from a PHP implementation on Linux to a .Net form on IIS. It has been massaged repeatedly using different tools, primarily by amateurs who know little of website design. I downloaded the source a year or so ago, with the intention of adding some new content and reorganizing it, but was completely floored by what I found. The last design go around was done by a front desk clerk with a copy of Web Expressions, and it's a mess. There are thousands of scripts, most never used, in hundreds of files. It looks to me as if she simply uploaded everything available, including all the canned material Microsoft provides with the pictures and verbiage I created years ago, and now it's almost impossible to determine what is used and what is just taking up space. What I'm looking for is a tool that I can run which will output a list of required resources called for by the visible pages, so that I can cull out everything else. Can someone point me to such a tool?
Will Rogers never met me.
Roger, you could use http://www.httrack.com/[^] to download the files from the website that HTTrack can identify. You could then FTP your whole site to your local computer then compare files and folders between these two website copies. OT Tucson, Arizona. I understand you are from near to there, what is that place like August/September? My 2nd youngest daughter is visiting there, and California, after her graduation.
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Roger, you could use http://www.httrack.com/[^] to download the files from the website that HTTrack can identify. You could then FTP your whole site to your local computer then compare files and folders between these two website copies. OT Tucson, Arizona. I understand you are from near to there, what is that place like August/September? My 2nd youngest daughter is visiting there, and California, after her graduation.
I'm quite a way from Tucson, but probably not as far as you. It's a little cooler in Summer than here - probably 110 to 120 instead of the 120 to 130 we experience. But that can vary a lot. Summer is our monsoon season, and Tucson gets a lot more rain than we do. These sudden violent storms can drop the temperature quickly and make the rest of the day quite pleasant. Figure on temps ranging from 60 at night to 120 in the daytime at the worst, but more likely between 75 and 110, with a chance of brief, heavy rain. Fortunately, Tucson has plenty of shopping centers, so if you need to grab a light coat or a pair of shorts, it's easy to find them. Tucson is a very nice place, much nicer than Bullhead City, and I expect that you'll enjoy the trip immensely!
Will Rogers never met me.
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I'm quite a way from Tucson, but probably not as far as you. It's a little cooler in Summer than here - probably 110 to 120 instead of the 120 to 130 we experience. But that can vary a lot. Summer is our monsoon season, and Tucson gets a lot more rain than we do. These sudden violent storms can drop the temperature quickly and make the rest of the day quite pleasant. Figure on temps ranging from 60 at night to 120 in the daytime at the worst, but more likely between 75 and 110, with a chance of brief, heavy rain. Fortunately, Tucson has plenty of shopping centers, so if you need to grab a light coat or a pair of shorts, it's easy to find them. Tucson is a very nice place, much nicer than Bullhead City, and I expect that you'll enjoy the trip immensely!
Will Rogers never met me.
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Roger, you could use http://www.httrack.com/[^] to download the files from the website that HTTrack can identify. You could then FTP your whole site to your local computer then compare files and folders between these two website copies. OT Tucson, Arizona. I understand you are from near to there, what is that place like August/September? My 2nd youngest daughter is visiting there, and California, after her graduation.
Thanks for the tip, Richard. I couldn't get HTTrack to download at the office - kept hanging after downloading 1 MB - but succeeded at home. Running it is straightforward, and it captured most of the contents, though it declared several items as 404. Those are easy enough to capture manually so it did its job admirably. The mirror is still over 270 files, but the size has dropped from almost 1 GB to a little more than 1 MB; that's a lot of overhead, and I still don't know whether it's because the Expressions tool is bloated crap, or the original designer was a moron who didn't know how to use it properly. Most of the files, though, are just simple visual elements; buttons, mostly. I would have put them all in a single file, I think, but I guess there's nothing technically wrong with doing it the way it was done. It just makes maintenance a bitch. I think I'm going to be allowed to hire an intern from the college to clean this up, and she's very skilled in Adobe Dreamweaver. Personally, I don't care for the product, but I must admit that it makes it simple to create stunning designs in a short time. Cleaning this up will make her job a lot less frustrating, and hopefully she'll be able to import much of the content into the Dreamweaver framework. Thanks again for the suggestion! :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
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Thanks for the tip, Richard. I couldn't get HTTrack to download at the office - kept hanging after downloading 1 MB - but succeeded at home. Running it is straightforward, and it captured most of the contents, though it declared several items as 404. Those are easy enough to capture manually so it did its job admirably. The mirror is still over 270 files, but the size has dropped from almost 1 GB to a little more than 1 MB; that's a lot of overhead, and I still don't know whether it's because the Expressions tool is bloated crap, or the original designer was a moron who didn't know how to use it properly. Most of the files, though, are just simple visual elements; buttons, mostly. I would have put them all in a single file, I think, but I guess there's nothing technically wrong with doing it the way it was done. It just makes maintenance a bitch. I think I'm going to be allowed to hire an intern from the college to clean this up, and she's very skilled in Adobe Dreamweaver. Personally, I don't care for the product, but I must admit that it makes it simple to create stunning designs in a short time. Cleaning this up will make her job a lot less frustrating, and hopefully she'll be able to import much of the content into the Dreamweaver framework. Thanks again for the suggestion! :-D
Will Rogers never met me.
Expressions Web is not too bad a product, but it is damned expensive to purchase. Unless you really must have the very latest version of this expensive product, I would recommend, if you need the graphical drag and dropping of elements, is MS Office SharePoint Designer 2007 which is free to download from Microsoft. But, if you still have a need for PHP support, as well as a requirement for a full IDE, go grab hold of Aptana Studio. I have version 2 but may soon update to version 3. It is free. DreamWeaver, again, is a good product, and just like MS Expressions, it is expensive to buy. When your college intern does her work, remind her to do an XML based SiteMap. It will help with Search Engine Optimizing. There are plenty free stuff that will do that for you including from Google. In terms of maintenance, you should consider using a versioning system such as TortoiseSVN