Indexing photo.net

Is it just me or is photo.net due for an upgrade to its index?

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Example ...

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Earlier today I recalled reading a Bob Atkins article on fisheyes

and DSLR's. I found <a

href="http://www.photo.net/learn/fisheye/">the article</a> by

searching photo.net for fisheye and scanning through the Google

photo.net search results (1120 hits); fortunately, the article was

in the top 5 hits.

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My earlier attempt at finding it by browsing through the Equipment

and Learn menus was unsuccessful.

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Searching is useful but so is browsing ...

This topic has been brought up at least six times in the last two weeks. You should have 'googled' it and it would have jumped at you from 'chainsaw+oil+sharpen+file'.

You are 100% correct. We need an overhaul of the site indexing, and since that's partly my responsibility, you can blame me.

 

There are multiple problems. First the site "just grew", so new sections were added pretty much randomly as neeeded. Some sections are a couple of menus deep, so hard to find unless you know where you are looking.

 

Second we have a "never break a link" policy, so redesigns have to leave the old stuff where it is or invisible redirect links have to be installed.

 

Third many of the indexing categories are non-exclusive, so links to a single article might belong on 4 or 5 different pages.

 

Keeping this whole thing straight is a nightmare. There's not even any simple way for me to figure out what all the static pages are and which directories they have been put into on the webserver.

 

A Google search is probably the single most efficient way to find any article on this site. It's usually pretty easy as long as you know some of the keywords to use.

 

Suggestions as to how things could be improved would be welcome, but like I said, the logical structure of the site is flawed and we can't break current links, so bear that in mind.

 

It might be an idea to have one major index page with expanding trees and listing of articles under mutliple headings. However don't underestimate the task of actually figuring out what we do have available, even with direct access to the servers. Articles are spread around all over the place. Not everything with a .html suffix is an article, though that's certainly a place to start.

 

It's a pretty big task, so keep on using the Google search for now.

 

But again, I do agree that we really need a better "table of contents" and "index" for the site and it's something that's not being ignored.

 

Everything I've added in the last 6 months can probably be found either in the "What's new" box on the front page or the "more..." link from that box.

Just for the record I did a search on the server, there are 1308 "*.html" files on the photo.net server, but not all of them are articles. Some are just pages displaying images. There are also 81 "*.htm" files, but again they aren't all articles.

 

I have the list, but going through all 1400 or so files to see exactly what they are is going to take a little time!

 

Then sorting them into a table of contents and index is going to take a little longer...

 

If anyone knows of any open source (free) software that runs under UNIX that might help in the task of generating things like tables of contents and index pages, please let me know.

 

If we could generate some sort of site map, that might also be a good way to go.

 

Currently someone (Brian or me) has to manually decide where each article belongs and then add it to the apropriate index page or pages via the CVS system - which is slow and clumsy.

Thanks Bob. Searching photo.net is easy with Google but browsing, instead of searching, is sometimes the way to go and an upgrade to support this would be great ...

Bob Thompson, this time ...

 

"chainsaw+oil+sharpen+file" ???

 

kidding, right?