SiteLite 2.0

Possible Asked Questions

...how do I:

[ make a new site ] [ make a new page ] [ move a page ]
[ make a block ] [ edit a block ] [ move a block ] [ freeze a page ]
[ change a style ] [ print the site ] [ speed up SiteLite ]
[ use the Internet ] [ use frames ] [ use dynamic pages ]

make a new site

If you want to make a completely new site you have three options:

1. You may start SiteLite and select new from the filemenu. This produces a simple script with some basic values, that you can correct directly in SiteLite. This is probably the easiest thing to do as a first SiteLite test.
2. You may start SiteLite and start editing the blank script area.
3. You may start any editor that produces pure ascii-code, write in your script, save it on your disk, and open it in SiteLite.

You can always test your script by pressing the interpret-script button, the glasses.

It is a good idea to keep your script in the catalog you specifies in the CATALOG= - line in the script. You don't have to do this, but it helps you keep things organised, until you get a better idea.

make a new page

Use SiteLite or your favourite text editor and edit in a new page-line in the script. You should also edit in a block-line immediately after the page-line. You don't have to edit the block at the moment. If you build the site, the hammer-button, and inspect the page, you will fine that it is built with some preliminary content in the block.

move a page

Use SiteLite or your favourite text editor and move the page-line and the associated block-lines (and possible based_on-lines) to the place you want, copy and paste. You don't have to move the page file.

make a block

Use SiteLite or your favourite text editor and insert a block-line after the page you want it to appear in. Unless you have a non-trivial block routing plan, the blocks will be inserted in the sequence they appear.

A non-trivial block routing involves the element <!--BLOCK TARGET=nn--> in the block and an element <!--nn--> in the template.

edit a block

You may use any editor that produces html-code to edit a block. You may use a simple text editor like Notes, you may use the edit mode in a browser like Netscape, you may use a specialised editor like PageMill. This is all up to your liking. A personal advice is to use an editor that gives you control of the details, and it is great if the editor supports html-syntaks by som ecolor coding.

It is important that you are able to control and edit the SiteLite elements which appear as (non-visible) html-comments in the html-text.

move a block

Use SiteLite or your favourite text editor and move the block-line after the page you want it to appear in. You don't have to move the block-file.

A well planned division of the material into blocks, makes it easy to reorganise your material at any time.

freeze a page

This may mean at least two things:

• You don't want the main contents of the page to change. The only things that should be changed are references, tables of contents, index etc. In that case you mark the page with option 'K' in the page line. The page will appear in tables of contents and it will contribute to indexes etc. and general replaces will occur. If the page contains no elements that will influence itself or the other pages this is a straight way to include an "alien" page.

  You may achieve the same effect by deleting the type specification in the page-line. The page is then, so to speak, its own template.

• You don't want anything to happen to the page at all. In that case you may simply comment it out of the script by placing // in the start of the page-line. (If the page has blocks, these are ignored automatically). The page will not appear on tables of contents etc. after the next build.

change a style

Use your favourite text editor and open the def.css-file, edit the style in question and save the file. You don't have to rebuild the page to see the effects of this change, simply ask the browser to reload the actual page.

It is beyond this text to explain Cascading Style Sheets in any level of detail.

A word of advice: Test your styles with all the browsers you expect your users to use. Cascading Style Sheets is (still) a fairly shaky concept and many details are implemented in differently ways, or simply ignored, in different browsers.

print the site

A website is primarily meant to be read from the screen, and printing is no key issue. Still experience shows that many users print sites they find interesting, and your site will of course fall into this category. The amount of paper used easily becomes enormous if all your users should print all your pages.

SiteLite lets you assemble selected pages into what is referred to as "print-pages". This makes it possible to offer the reader a print of essentials. It also makes it possible for you to assemble the whole site or parts of the site for processing in an other program, typically a word processor that can read html.

What you do is to insert a page-line with type PP, and an associated bloc-line. Build the site and edit the <!--PRINT...--> element in the bloc. If you want many selective print-pages, you repeat this operation.

speed up SiteLite

SiteLite works fairly efficient for normal computers and "not-too-large" sites. You will however experience that there are some operations that may slow down sitebuilding. There are a lot of things you may do to gain speed:

• Turn off Internet-access. If you use any files (blocks, pages, templates, resources) that are located somewhere else on the Internet, SiteLite will always try to get the latest version of these files. On the other hand, SiteLite always make and keep local copies of such files on your disk. So if you don't expect any updates on your Internet-based materiel, you may "turn off the Internet".
• If you are concentrated on getting one, or a few, pages right, you should use the "Build selected"- button or menu.
• You may enclose a set of lines in the script by /* and */ lines to mask out part of the script temporarily.
• You may introduce // in the start of a single line to mask out this line temporarily.
• There are a few operations that may take some time, depending on your specifications. The important ones are available for temporary exclusion in the menu "Properties-When building".

use the Internet

SiteLite accepts templates, resources, and pages from an URL.

Blocks and pages are copied to catalogs that are placed locally to the sitecatalog, in a catalog called "imported" with the same structure as they have on the original server.

If an imported block or page contains references to images, these images are copied according to the same naming strategy and the addresses are recalculated according to the page where the images is inserted.

All access to the Internet is via the http-protocol. SiteLite prompts user before it accepts redirections and it gives up if the page requires a password. In technical terms SiteLite works smooth if it gets a 200-response to its request.

use frames

SiteLite lends itself easily to support a frame based solution. The key is to introduce the frame describing pages as pages with level 0. SiteLite comes with a set of templates that describe a simple frame-solution. The easiest way to get control of frames is to start SiteLite and make a new site with File-New menu. Select frame based in the dialog box that follows. You can inspect the files and templates and modify them at will.

use dynamic pages

SiteLite has no explicit support for dynamic pages, in any interpretation of the word "dynamic". SiteLite does however not bother about the content of the pages, and it should be rather straightforward to support a combination of a fixed structure in SiteLite with page dynamics in any number of frames.