Oh It Burns!
The urge to strangle myself is rising. I just finished looking through my offline copy of the CSHS website. I am beginning to organize pages, group them into sections, delete unnecessary ones, etc. I thought that this task would be easy, just a simple pruning of pages with some renaming and reorganization. Nope.
I copied the entire site to a folder on my computer via FTP. Then I proceeded to make a new directory structure, and I started opening each and every page to check whether it was worthy of making it into the newly reorganized site. I have been forever traumatized. First, I began noticing that all the teacher pages I had opened so far were blank, with no information except for the teacher’s name and a link to go back to the main teacher listing. Upon checking all teacher pages, I found that not a single one of the 70+ teacher pages had even the tiniest shred of content or useful information whatsoever. Those found their way into the Recycle Bin very quickly.
Then I started to notice other pages that looked like excerpts from the district’s massive student handbook. I was later shocked to realize that someone had wasted their time putting the entire student handbook into HTML format with a separate page for every section. The complete idiocy of this baffles me. Is this person one of the slower few that have not yet heard of the almighty PDF? Of course, those pages (all 50 of them) will go as soon as I find a PDF copy of the handbook.
Among other atrocities on the server were two 15+ megabyte video files (which most people probably wouldn’t have the patience to download), dozens of graphics that were no longer in use, lots of remnants from the mediacenter pages that are no longer under our jurisdiction, and these really annoying _vti_cnf directories that FrontPage has to drop everywhere possible to work correctly. This heresy must be destroyed! I call upon the papal armies to try and burn these heretics of web design and site management! Let Jakob Nielson die of a stroke after viewing only a single page! Let Zeldman and Shea and Cederholm and all those other gods strike down the creators of this digital horror, so that it may never again strike anger and fear in the hearts of lowly mortals such as myself.
INFLAMMATORY POST ALERT! (Oops…too late.)