Evolution of a Home Page

1999
May 20, 1999 7500 links, 100+ awards
Over the past few months we've been adding a number of features, this is the point where they all ended up together in one large page (more on that later). We've added a browser stats area to the toolbar, an HTML newsletter, and a quick poll feature.
The front page is now becoming a collection of content modules, merged in and SSI'd. It's now assembled every ten minutes automatically from the initial index-template.html file in four stages using a CRON job, two for news harvester (insert static headlines and javascript array of headlines for the scroller) two Web find-and-replace scripts that insert two text files of daily browser stats and a random HTML newsletter ad. Each of these text files is generated by another CRON job.
We now use SSI's for the internet.com toolbars, to make site-wide changes easier. The new quick poll is inserted into the page using an exec SSI:

Nav Bar: We've changed our site-wide nav bar again. To boost subsciptions we changed "update" to "subscribe" and added a new tell-a-friend script, to let users email other users about webref.
May 24, 1999
Speed-optimized version. The problem with the previous version was with all those wonderful features the file size was a whopping 26.25K. I hand-optimized the page to removed extra code and unnecessary features, combined multiple adjacent graphics into one (see above), removed unnecessary "www.'s" for domains with the right c-names, and used ISMAPs to create shorter URLs. The new optimized page is a mere 13.4K, half as small, and loads twice as fast. I removed the scroller, with a new improved one on the way.

URL: http://www.webreference.com/dev/evolution/1999.html