Tools for Website Content Cleanup? - resource-cleanup

I am working with a client to migrate a web site from the existing production hardware into a new hardware environment. Now seems like an excellent time to perform an audit and remove any old or obsolete content rather than just blindly copy it again.
Are there any good free tools or scripts I can use to compare the web accessible content on a server to the actual files on a server to see what content is actually being linked to and used?
Thanks in advance for any help!

Well, for starters you can use a tool like Xenu's Link Sleuth to spider all of your pages to find broken links and the like. We used this tool on our intranet to find and fix our broken links. It's free and gets the job done.
Another tool that we have used for migrations between systems is a search engine. A good search engine will spider all of your pages and show the two-way relationship between links. This can help you find what content is being linked to the most and what is possibly orphaned. Unfortunately, these kinds of tools are not free.

I'm sure there is but I'm sure there isn't one that could do a better job than you could yourself, ya know? How big is this site and did you code it yourself?

Related

Allowing others to copy and tweak my Rails app online

I have developed a relatively simple Rails web application that others (non-programmers) may find useful. I would like to provide a web interface for anyone who wants to create their own copy of my app and change some minor settings, like the appearance, the name of the app and some of its resources, that type of thing. What kind of technology would allow me to do this? Thank you in advance!
GitHub is probably one of the most popular tools to support this, but there are many others such as SourceForge. I'd start from there and do some research to decide the best one for your purposes.
The best way to collaborate code online is through git. The most popular sites for git management include GitHub and BitBucket. Here's a good article suggesting nine alternatives.
However, you stated it would be used by "non-programmers". I can't tell if they will find it useful through the function of the application or the simplicity of the code, so it seems reasonable to also suggest non-git options.
You could use something like Amazon Web Services or Google Cloud to host the static files. See the AWS S3 docs regarding creating a bucket and adding an object.
If you would like to host the entire application online and allow users to easily edit and view the application in-browser, check out cloud9.

Web-based database/forms RAD tool

I'm searching for something of which I don't really know the name of.
From time to time, I have to develop a small tool for a small group of users which is basically a web frontend to one or two database tables. It's very basic and something which one could do in a spreadsheet (without the problem that only one user can have the file open at a time and something like Sharepoint is not available) or for what one would have chosen MS Access in the 90s. Google Docs would also be possible, but we'd like to keep our data in-house. (I for myself just use phpMyAdmin for that, but it's not suitable for not tech-savvy end-users.)
So I'm looking for a tool which generates/provides a forms-based Web interface for simple models or database schemes that I create. First, is there a common name for such a thing? And second, does anyone have recommendations (preferably open source and/or free)? The closest thing I've come to is the scaffold generator in Ruby on Rails, but it's very basic and not optimal since it's only designed for generating prototype could which one should edit later, and last time I have looked at it, it was not possible to differently updating your model, i. e. regenerate code for model changes but preserving the manual changes of your code.
Thank you.
You're looking for Web UI Framework. Look into http://agiletoolkit.org/

blog without any server side scripting, is it a good idea?

I am planning to build a website. I can build the front end with html,css and javascript with the help of twitter bootstrap and jquery ui. Actually i have done a bit of work and it looks good to me.
But I am short of knowledge in case of server side language, (just learning python and django in fact).
So is it advised to build by blog without the database things and all? or should i delay it by 3-4 months until i learn server side programming?
Can I do thing like searching posts, sorting them , comment on post with out the use of databases?
Is it easy to transform my blog to a database based one in later stage easily without taking it off the web?
ps: i dont want to use blogging platforms like wordpress.
you can make a website using static web pages. But that wont be really good enough for your users or readers. Besides that you really have to put a lot of time in manually writing the code for each page.
But if you choose to build a dynamic blog that will be better for the readers. You deploy functions like search , comment more easily.
Using a free and open source blogging platform like wordpress will cut down your task. It has ready made themes, plug ins available to get your tasks done and customize your site the way you want.Again it will be far more secure and attractive.
So my suggestion will be to go with wordpress.
And as far as the learning par is concerned you will learn more stuff while working with wordpress than building a static site

client side search engine

I would like to get some suggestions on my current headache. I have been researching on search engine for client side browser. I am building custom glossary project. The idea of the search engine will be used for searching terms, keywords, or definitions.
Here are my requirements for this project
no server side support. Total client side
only for intranet
build for browser that is not HTML5
thousands of terms
Any suggestions or ideas on how to build the client-side only search engine?
Thanks in advance
Barring a full desktop app, I don't see how you can do this without a server. Distribute the HTML files as a .ZIP file and browse them locally? If yes, you probably need to make a honking big page with the whole database inside it (as Javascript data structures) and search that way. Shouldn't be too hard with regexes etcetera, but I doubt whether you'll end up with a fun user experience...
Really curious why a simple server-side solution won't work :-)

Is there a Ruby on Rails site thumbnail generator available?

I'm hoping to avoid building this if it already exists. Does anyone know of a plugin for Ruby on Rails that will generate a screenshot of a web site? Thanks in advance to anyone who can help me find one.
As far as I am aware you need a server with a desktop (eg. Gnome, X11, KDE) and a web browser with thumbnail capabilities installed (eg. webkit and CutyCapt). Of course this is not usual for a Linux server.
I have used the service suggested by Soufiane using code based on Peter Coopers snippet and it works very well.
Generating website thumbnails would require significant server resources and some sort of background process and job queue so using a web thumbnail generation service might be a better alternative to generating your own.
Yes there is a wonderful solution:
http://webthumb.bluga.net/
It has an great API and there are some Ruby Wrappers (i.e. http://github.com/simplificator/rwebthumb)
It allows you to process 100 thumbnails a month, if you need more the price for credits is very generous if you ask me.
This is not a plugin, but I found this snippet which is using an external site to do what you want (I think.). I didn't test it though.
This is getting a little dated now, but just for posterity's sake there is an answer over here

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