When a change is made to templates, or even to the advertisers, it's nice to update the site.

Certain pages, like Ratings, Cool, etc are *NOT* updated on BUILD ALL unless they are marked as changed in the database. (variable)

Pages and categories that have no links on them are also not updated past the first build, so they too remain static and with old advertising. (index.html pages)

This causes certain problems:

1) It causes advertisers to not be updated -- and potentially can create problems (legal or otherwise).

2) It prevents the 'look and feel' of the site from being updated on a routine 'build all' if no changes had been made to the database.

Anyway, thought I'd pass that on, since it drove me crazy for 2 days trying to figure out why certain 'deleted' advertisers were still showing up in my daily stats.

"Build All" should rebuild EVERY SINGLE page possible, not only changed ones... and it doesn't seem to.

Scott


[This message has been edited by pugdog (edited July 02, 1999).]

I am sorry to tell you, but when nph-build.cgi runs, it DOES rebuild each and every page. Don't forget to refresh the page in your browser though.

I did, and I built several times. I restarted my machine several times, went through several Netscape crashes, even ran MS IE to verify ... same problem. The Index.html pages with no links were NOT being updated.

The only way I got around it was killing my old pages directory, and starting a new PAGES directory, and rebuilding the whole site from 'zero.'

I know for a FACT that BUILD ALL skips some pages. For 3 days I was building 20x or more a day, but I was still dealing up advertisers on category pages that 0 links on them.

I didn't realize this, and was trying to track down why these deleted advertisers were still appearing.

It wasn't until the entire directory tree was rebuilt, that the advertisers went away, and the site was updated properly.

I don't have the resources to keep checking this, but it took 2-3 days, and caused a lot of grief.

But it's real... and it happened. And it probably is a logic bug where the category is opened and written, but not updated if it has no links (only "related" items).

Which ... btw .. were not updated either until I rebuilt the site tree from scratch.

I wish I knew more about links flow, or it was easier to follow, so I could point exactly to the problem. In a few weeks I might, but right now I don't. I can only report the side effects.

Scott

Scott,

I guess we will have to agree to disagree then. Links rebuilds ALL pages. You can test this for yourself by including the date and time at the bottom of the page by putting this in each site_html.pl subroutine or in each template file, respectively:



Each page will take on the date/time stamp of the rebuild.