Using Site Master

Contents




Getting Started


Installation

 To install Site Master to your hard disc, simply drag the !SiteMastr icon from your floppy disc, into a Site Master directory on your hard drive. You may wish to put Site Master alongside the other internet or web design tools that you use on a regular basis. You may also wish to copy !Publish and !WebUpload onto your hard disc, too.
The WebFS directory contains our long filenames system, and instructions are included in that directory covering installation and use.


Running Site Master and Loading a web site

smicon.gif - 367 bytes Run !SiteMastr by double clicking on its icon on your hard disc.
You will see a window open in the centre of your screen (this is the index [site] viewer), and an icon appear on the iconbar.
Move your pointer over the buttons around the sides of the window to see what they do.
  Drag a web site or the index page from a web site to this window.
Site Master will now scan your web site finding all the files.
Next it will scan any HTML files it found looking for links.
These are then cross referenced and recorded for later use.

Now you have Site Master running and a web site loaded.
It is recommended that you take a back up of your site before making extensive changes with Site Master. By its nature, it is extremely powerful, and can alter files/links etc. across your whole site.
We take no liability for any damage caused by Site Master however unlikely such damage is.


The File Display


Site Master file displays have a 'Web' drawn on them behind the directory entries to help avoid confusion with genuine filer windows. This can be turned on and off in the configuration window. (see below)

Double clicking on a file with SELECT will open a directory in the current view or run a file.
Double clicking on a file with ADJUST will open a directory in a new view or run a file.


Toolbars and Buttons


The Filer Toolbar


Go back to the index of sites
Pressing menu whilst over the index view allows you to tell Site Master to remember sites between sessions. Site Master will automatically scan remembered sites when run.
Go back to the root of this site

Go back one directory
Open the link search window
From the search window, you can search all the URL's in a site for the specified text. There is an option to toggle case sensitivity on/off.
When you click on Search, a list of all the places where the specified link occurs is generated. These links can then be edited individually by [SHIFT] clicking on them, or a selection can be replaced with specified text.

Open the site-wide search/replace window
This window functions in much the same way as the link search window above, except that it will search and replace across whole files, rather than restricting the search to link/image URLs. The window has a number of wildcard options, allowing for extremely flexible searching. When the results are shown, you can select multiple entries to replace more than one at a time. If you click Replace with no entries selected, all will be replaced. A menu is also available allowing you to preview selected pages, or edit them in HTMLEdit.

Links To and Links From Selected File


The three buttons:      are used to toggle which links are displayed.
The left hand icon opens a window listing all the links to a selected file or directory.
The central icon displays all the links from the selected file or directory in a window.
The right hand icon toggles which links are included in the list. When selected, all links (including images etc.)are displayed. When off (as shown) only page links (in <a href=""> tags) to/from the selected page are listed.

Files in the file display are coloured red if they are not linked to/from anywhere. (ie Site Master thinks that they are unused)

Links are coloured as follows:


Editing Links


There are three other ways to open the link editor window as well:

The two buttons:     comment out and delete all selected links respectively.

You can view or edit a selection of files by selecting them and then clicking on the view button. Holding SHIFT whilst doing this will load them into an editor. There is a configuration option to force editing in HTML Edit.


The Tree View


tree.gif - 1040 bytes The tree view is one of the most useful aspects of Site Master. It is opened either by clicking on the appropriate button, or from the filer menu within site master. It displays a tree style plan of your web site and highlights files of interest.

The following highlighting options are provided:


Clicking on a file in the tree view will take you to that file in the directory tree. Right clicking will open a new Site Master window showing the file, so that you don't lose your place. Once you have moved to that position in the main Site Master window, you can make alterations, or farm the page out to HTMLEdit etc.


Saving out your Site for Uploading etc.


Changes to links and moving files is reflected in the files and filer directory structure straight away. However it is sometimes desirable to save out a selection of files, all the files edited since a certain date, only files that are used or any combination of the three.

Site Master caters for this through the use of the save button, which will open the save window giving you the following options:


Site Master Menus


The main Site Master view window has two distinct menus, giving access to a number of Important Site Master features. The first is the Index menu, and is available only in the top level view of your site (ie. the one listing the currently active sites, shown after a site has been scanned). The second important menu is the File menu, displayed when you press MENU over a file within your site.

The Index Menu
To open the Index menu, click the middle (MENU) mouse button over the folder representing your site in the top level of the Site Master view. Press the Index button at the top of the left hand toolbar to reach this. The menu has a number of important options.

Rescanning a Site for Links/Images


If you make a change to your site using an external program, or by altering things in your computer's standard Filer display, the Rescan option on the Index menu forces Site Master to re-check the links and images in your site. This can also be extremely useful if you are maintaining a site on a network, and you suspect someone else has updated part of the site whilst Site Master has been running.

Remember/Forget site (Remembers sites between sessions)


If you are working on the same site over a number of sessions, you can use the Remember/Forget for Next Session options on the Index menu to preserve the site in Site Master's list for the future. The software will remember scanned links etc. as well, to make returning to a site much faster than reloading it from scratch.

If you have finished working on a particular site for the time being, and no longer need it, but wish to continue working on other sites (ie. you don't want to quit Site Master), simply click on the Forget option, and the site will disappear from the Index window.

Site Statistics


This option opens a window showing you the link information which was displayed whilst the site was originally being scanned for links and images. Whilst this information is not important in and of itself, it is often useful to have some idea of the size and scale of the site.

At the bottom of this window is a Save button, allowing you to generate a report about the links and images on your site. Various options are available to customize what information is included in the report. By default, the report will list all the "broken" links and images in the site.

Set Link Root


This is covered in more detail below. It's presence on the Index menu is simply to allow you to set the Link Root at this level. Don't worry, this is explained in more detail below!

The Site Master Files Menu


This menu is opened by pressing the MENU mouse button over any file or directory in the main Site Master window, except when at the top "Index" level of the site.

Renaming/Moving/Copying/Deleting Files


Moving off the File "xxx" menu, you have access to a number of extremely powerful Site Master features. It is, of course, easy to copy or rename a file on your hard disc in the normal way, but this will break any links to that file in your web site. By using the appropriate option on the Site Master File menu, the program will update any links to that file as necessary.

Adding File Extensions and Altering the Case of Filenames


These functions are an extension of the Renaming facilities offered above, but automate some common processes which would otherwise require doing separately to each file. For example, it may be that you have images in your site which do not have the correct PC/Unix file extension. They may well have been used in your pages in this form, so simply adding a file extension normally would cause major problems. However, by using this option in Site Master, the file extension can be calculated and added, and links updated automatically.

Similarly, the Unix world is case sensitive when it comes to filenames. As a result, it is common practice to use all lowercase filenames. It is certainly important that the filename case matches with the case used in links. The Filename Case options cope with these problems, and allow changes to be made without breaking pages.

Marking Files so that Site Master knows that they are Used


The Mark As Used... option is extremely useful if you are developing a site with external Java classes, scripts, or files called from JavaScript. Site Master will not normally know that these files are used, as it will not see references to them in your pages. However, you know that they are used, and you can tell Site Master using this option.

Site Master uses a system of so-called Meta tags, which are information tags place in your HTML pages. Using this system, you can tell Site Master that a page requires certain files, and Site Master will behave appropriately. The Meta tags go in the <HEAD> of your page, and are of the form:
       <META SITEMASTER-LINK="filename">
If you click on the Mark as Used... option, SiteM aster will open a window allowing you to choose which file will be the "Parent" of the selected file. This will generate the link automatically.

Creating New Directories


The Site Master Files menu has the option to create a new directory in your site. This works in the same way as creating a directory on your hard disc, but has the convenience of being available within Site Master, rather than needing to be done outside the program.

Setting The Root for Links


This feature can be found on both the Index and File menus, and as such, warrants a section to itself. Many web page authors need to make links in their sites relative to the root directory (ie. links of the form href="/directory/file.html").

The original version of Site Master wouldn't cope with this at all (unless the site being created was in the same position on your hard drive as on your web server), resulting in sites appearing to contain broken links. In Site Master 2, the program will automatically set the root directory to be the directory you originally dragged into the application when you loaded the site in the first place. In most cases, this is sufficient, as your files start in the root directory of your web site.

However, this is not always the case, and in such situations, you can set the root to be a different part of the site, using the "Set Link Root" options found on the menus.

NB, the Link Root directory is always marked in green, hence the appearance of each new site in the "Index" window.


The Configuration Window


This is accessed by pressing MENU over the Site Master icon on the iconbar, and picking Options from the menu.


So, what's new since the previous version?


  * New site-wide search/replace (v1 had search/replace for links
    only) including full wildcard searches, refining of the "found"
    list, replacement of selected finds and much more.
     
  * New tree view options for identifying files of specific type
    or file extension.  Tree view finds can also be "inverted"
    to show those "not found".
     
  * New "mark as used" system to include extra resources in your
    site, which would not normally be regarded as used eg. Java
    sub-class files, external JavaScript resources, other scripts
    etc.  SiteMaster generates extra  tags allowing you
    to identify which pages require these extra resources.
     
  * Setting the "root" directory for a site.  Some page authors
    need to make references to files in links relative to the
    root directory (eg. href="/pages/index.html") but may
    have the site lower down the directory structure on their
    hard drive.  SM2 now allows you to set a particular 
    directory to be the "root", so that it can deal with this
    situation correctly.
  
  * Up to 3 times faster than SiteMaster 1
     
  * Most existing features have been "refined" to ensure that
    they better cope with unexpected situations eg. add file 
    extension, swap case etc.
    
  * Enhanced "Save/Export Site" options, including automatic
    support for saving as Zip and Tar archives, if used alongside
    !SparkFS from David Pilling.
    
  * Native export for Zip, Tar and GZIP'd Tar (.tgz)    

  * Support for RISC OS 4 long filenames
  
  * Allows "reporting" on sites, which will generate a single list
    of broken links/images and other information for you to work
    from.
    
  * Table backgrounds, Javascript files, CSS linked files are now supported
  
  * A9, Iyonix and RPC compatible
  
  * mailto links in  tags are now handled correctly (amongst other things)
  
  * several crash situations have been fixed