The Weekly Routine

I have an image in mind, of webmasters working every week to get their latest photo sets together and posting them online to keep site subscribers happy. It makes me smile.The Weekly Routine

I have an image in mind, of webmasters working every week to get their latest photo sets together and posting them online to keep site subscribers happy. It makes me smile.

Keeping content fresh is one of the most important things for any webmaster to do. Fresh content attracts your audience. You will get repeat surfers to your site if it is well maintained. For adult Web sites that generate money from subscription fees, frequent updates are essential. No one wants to let their credit card get charged for a second month of content if they believe the content won’t be any different than the first month.

In particular, predictable changes (every Friday, for instance) give the users confidence in the site. A regular schedule helps a site stand out from the competition as it will be more organized, reliable, and able to deliver satisfaction.

YNOT readers understand this. Past articles have emphasized the importance of frequent changes (Jeremy Holcomb, August 10, 2000 ), and also advocated regularly scheduled changes (Jeff Mecca, December 14, 2000 ). Individual sites put it to use, as well. When I surf, I see plenty of sites with dedicated pages for “What’s New” indicating what was updated on what day.

What’s Wrong With This Picture?

The image that comes to mind is a set of webmasters that work every week, diligently making changes to their sites. The highly dedicated will make sure the changes are made the same day every week. Maybe even the same time of day. I’m smiling again, but I’m shaking my head in disgust.

Stop it! Stop doing that! There’s no need to work on your site every week.

Sounds like I’m contradicting myself, but I’m not. Fresh content means regularly scheduled content changes. It does not mean regularly scheduled work for you. The two are not the same. If you have a lawn, you probably don’t water it everyday, you set up an automatic sprinkler once, and let it do the work.

Your Web site is served by a computer. Computers are programmable. Technically, there’s no difference between making changes to content and watering the lawn. The only problem is setting up the sprinkler.

A Simple Sample Scheduler Let’s look at a simple sprinkler, shall we? Here it is, written in PHP, in just five lines:

>?php
$date = getdate();
$file = $date[‘month’] . ‘.htm’;
readfile($file);
?<

This simple code takes the current date, produces a file name based on the month, like April.htm, and spits out the file with that name.

Imagine that we had files January.htm, February.htm, and so on. If we saved those five lines of PHP as monthly.php, then whenever a visitor requested monthly.php, what the visitor would actually get is January.htm, or June.htm, or whatever the current month was. We now have instant changes determined by the calendar. We just make our 12 files, and relax for the year.

Here’s an improved version, still five lines:

>?php
$date = getdate();
$file = ‘../month_stuff/’ . $date[‘year’] . ‘_’ . $date[‘month’] . ‘.htm’;
readfile($file);
?<

The file that is returned by the PHP has a path and year-specific name like “../month_stuff/2001_April.htm”. One improvement is that the year is included, so we don’t have to write-over past files every year. Another is that we draw this from a different directory, probably one that the site visitor does not have access to. Then we could index old months (through another PHP page) without letting the user guess at names for future files to gain access to them.

A Working Example

That was a simple example, sure, but not much different from what I do for my weekly lists. On my home page, a weekly list appears, like “Erotic Photographers I Like” or “Great Stripper Names”. I have these scheduled to change every Saturday morning. There is an inventory built up that stretches months into the future. I can insert “current events” lists when I want (like “More Interesting Florida Recounts”), but rest assured the majority of the time that it changes every weekend without any work from me.

There are plenty of differences between the simple example and my lists.

I wrote the list code in Perl, and it has more interaction than the example above, as people can search the lists and submit their own entries. The lists update every week, not just every month, plua, the weekly files are not simply shown, they are processed and formatted first. But the basic principle is the same: open up the corresponding file for a given date and display it. It accomplishes the same goal: scheduled content. And, it gets the desired result: people come back to see the lists regularly. Just look at who adds to the lists, and see how the same names show up over and over.

Almost everything on my page can be scheduled the same way. Journal articles, polls, and spotlighted links can all be scheduled to appear at set times. Not only are they scheduled on their own pages, but the home page is coded to look for new items as well, and highlights the new content to readers. Again, this is more complicated content management than our five line sprinkler, using databases and shared Perl modules, but the basic idea is the same.

Put Time in the Bank

I have a different picture in my mind now. It should fill your heart with joy. Webmasters that have done a dozen photo sessions in a couple of weeks, and scheduled the content, can now relax on the beach for a whole month while their Web sites update themselves. So stop working every week, and start scheduling. If you don’t feel comfortable doing your own programming work, hire a coder (just like you would hire a photoshop expert to build a site tour for you). Those five lines above took about ten minutes to write and test. A few hours of coding work could buy you a lot of time at the beach.