How to structure a large website as I convert it to Xara?

[IanB]

Hi

I have run an extensive website over the last 15 years or more called 'Songs of the Inland Waterways' which has the lyrics of approximately 300 songs related to the UK canal system. It contains hundreds of audio files and increasingly videos (some are just YouTube links but others are contained within the site so that I have a copy should they 'disappear').

Pages were created when the need arose using Dreamweaver 8 and basic HTML about which I know a bit but not too much.

So that I can achieve the desired page designs I've started re-doing pages using Xara Designer Pro X(v18). I've got a couple of pages done (the first two on the alphabetical A page) and have placed them in a sub-sub-folder of the main site /Xara/Songs_A/. This means my original HTML versions still exist in the main folder in case they have been linked to from elsewhere.

Eventually, here's the question : What would be the best way to structure the Xara subfolder? The options would seem to range from a Xara file containing every song (clearly unmanageable) to a separate Xara file for each separate song. At the moment I'm thinking of putting about 10 songs maximum in each Xara file and using sub-folders such as Xara/Songs_B1-10/ or Xara/Songs_M11-20/

Does this seem like a good idea or is there a much better way? Though each song page on the site is similar they are by no means identical and I don't want to have to learn any new programming language or use a database. I want the flexibilty of being able to create the pages with XDPX and am just seeking the best way to store them.

Thanks for all the help I've had previously.

Regards,
Ian

[handrawn]

can't help with your query, but nice site...

way back I remember Gary & Vera Aspey singing the [old] rosemary in a folk club the name of which i can't for the life of me remember, in sheffield; a song with a lovely lilting lapping dreamy tune - Peter Dodds is a bit more 'gritty' than they were, but it is lovely to hear it again, looked on the off chance, and there it was

[gwpriester]

This is ancient but it still works. http://archive.xaraxone.com/webxealo...kbook%201.html

[Acorn]

Ian, you have hundreds of audio files so the first thing I would do is create a design file, change the index filename to songs and save it as a XAR file named songs.xar. It should be saved in a unique folder, let's call that Inland Waterways.
Next, adjacent to the XAR file, create another folder and call it songs_xar_files.
In this, create sub-folders, 0-9, A, B, ..., Z. You name the first page away from index to the same name as the design filename, so 0-9.xar will have a first page filename of 0-9 and it is publishes to a HTML file called 0-9.htm with a folder 0-9_htm_files. See Gary's diagram; the main difference i you will be publishing everything into the same root folder.
Collate all your audio MP3s in these sub-folders.

You only need to publish this once and all the songs will be available for linking to from separate pages across your design.

The sole purpose of doing it this way is you only publish the songs once. You can quickly FTP new songs without republishing the whole thing every time.
All the other web design pages (XAR files) are trivial in size so you are not weighed down by lengthy upload times.
These design pages are published into the same folder as the songs.xar is published to.
You could end up with a collection of htm files, 0-9, A, B, ... Z, songs and associated folders *_htm_files.
Everything that is added into songs_xar_files is copied into songs_htm_files on publishing.

You would never drop a song onto a design page.
You would enter a link of form song_htm_files/0-9/0 Intro.mp3.
Such a simple link would open and play the song in a separate browser tab but @Initiostar and I have already developed a simple player to get round this.

Acorn

[IanB]

This is ancient but it still works. http://archive.xaraxone.com/webxealo...kbook%201.html

Thanks Gary. That's very useful and suggests I was on the right track. The significant difference between my site and the example site may be that one folder 'Songs' would be disproportionately large and would need many sub-folders. That was my plan. I wasn't planning on having an index.html page in each sub-folder and was going to link directly via the internal website folder structure. Is there any need to (or advantage in) having an index.html file in each sub-folder and linking via web addresses?

IanB

[IanB]

I think I cross posted with you Acorn as I replied to Gary.

Thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed plan. I have read it twice and will, I think, now try to set up a test site which will help me understand it better.

IanB

[Acorn]

I think I cross posted with you Acorn as I replied to Gary.
Thanks for taking the time to provide such a detailed plan. I have read it twice and will, I think, now try to set up a test site which will help me understand it better.
IanB

Ian, do note the MP3s will play in a separate Tab as i have not advised how to invoke a Player on the page.

Acorn

[Initiostar]

Ian, do note the MP3s will play in a separate Tab as i have not advised how to invoke a Player on the page.

Acorn

I thought the Island Waterways website would be good test for extending Audio Plugin v3 to accommodate auto-display of information directly related to the songwriter, such as the words, chords, references and any related videos.

I've combined the ideas from the Audio Player with some of the ideas from the Video Player. The key task is to ensure that one has an effective toggle between audio and video and that one does not play over the other.

All the audio and video content is stored on a secure server, only the links are in the Xara design file. The supporting material for each song has a Class Name and each class has its own layer in the design file. There would be just 27 pages to cover all the songs structured in alphabetic groups, each letter with its own page plus a page for 0-9.

It has ultimate flexibility; the links can be a list as in the example, album covers or anything of the designer's choice : Audio Visual Plugin v1

Still very much Work-in-Progress; the code needs some rework, but it seems to work well. It's not an off-the-shelf plugin by any means, but the designer has a library of prebuilt audio and video functions, such as start (load), play and pause for audio and video.

Jukebox-v4.xar

Gary

BTW the latest video plugins:

[Egg Bramhill]

Between you and Acorn you're doing great stuff Gary!

[IanB]

Hi

The following was written before I was aware of Initiostar's contribution above which I will no doubt be very interesting, helpful, challenging but informative. I'll be reading it carefully in a moment but in the meantime I thought I'd post what I'd already written.

Just thought I'd let you know how I've progressed with this and see if anyone can spot any glaring errors in my method.

I have to admit that I was straining to understand some parts of the Audio Player thread (and on-line description of the audio command) and at some point I copied and pasted from a posted Xara file on that thread and with slight changes to size and autoplay seem to have got a working audio. An example of the code is shown:


<audio id="sotiw" src="http://www.waterwaysongs.info/sounds/alice_white.mp3" controls controlsList="nodownload" style="width: 320px;" ></audio>

I'm not sure what the controlsList command does or if it is necessary? I'm also wondering if I should be aware of any code needed elsewhere that I may have introduced unknowingly with the Xara copy-and-paste I mentioned.

Rather than put all the audio files in a new file as was suggested, I've kept them in the 'sounds' folder in the root directory of this website and linked directly to them. This means they still remain available to the old Dreamweaver produced pages which also live in the root directory and avoided duplication.

The new Xara produced pages will live in a sub-directory Songs which will be further subdivided into directories, A,B,C etc. So far only the songs beginning with A have been re-done.

I'm hoping that I can keep the large video files out of the pages and just link to them in a similar way to the audio files.

The new Xara pages (songs beginning with A) can be linked to from :

http://www.waterwaysongs.info/songmenu.htm

This solution is based on the help given by Gary, Initiostar and Acorn so I thank them all - but I worry I'm missing something. Any comments?

IanB