(I'm copying this into Mike Pitt - Mike, could you post this to
gna-tech unless you have an easy answer :-)
The problem is: given the course hypertree which changes rapidly
(often daily), how do we know which branches are worth exploring to find
if there is anything new at the bottom?
This is rather like exploring a directory tree with the same
purpose. I can think of the following methods:
- every page is stamped with a date. At present this is up to
the authors, but we could run a cron job which did that using the UNIX
date on the file. It would also have to stamp the containing directory
index.html and so on recursively up the tree. I'm not wild about this!
- there is a tool which uses find to locate all those pages which
have been touched after a given date. I think that www94 did this.
Course members would run a form in which they could ask for all files
later than a certain date. We - or GNA-tech - would need to write such a
system.
- we keep a what's new of everything that happens. This requires
some poor guy to keep track of every page that is altered *significantly*
and write something about it. Don't like it very much.
- we *could* ask authors to mail the lists every time they alter something.
I am very sympathetic to this request - I find the same problem myself! I
suspect that there is no clear answer.
P.
Peter Murray-Rust (pmr1716@ggr.co.uk) Glaxo Research & Development, Greenford,UK
mbglx@seqnet.dl.ac.uk, http://www.dl.ac.uk/CBMT/pmr.html (Thanks to AlanBleasby)