Tuesday, March 29, 2005

The Launch Procedure

I've been thinking about the steps we need to take in order to launch the new website. Launching will basically involve transferring all of the files from the /bcimnew/ account into the /bcimnew/ account, but there's more to it than that. This is what I plan to do...
  1. make fresh local copies of both the /bcim/ and /bcimnew/ LSBU Unix accounts on my Mac; I'll call these /bcim-prelaunch/ and /bcimnew-prelaunch/
  2. make a duplicate of /bcimnew-prelaunch/; I'll call this /bcimnew-temp/
  3. do a global "find & replace" on all of the files within /bcimnew-temp/ on my Mac - including the cgi scripts - to replace all occurrences of "bcimnew" by "bcim"
  4. do a global "find & replace" on all of the files within the CV page template files to replace all occurrences of "bcimnew" by "bcim", and ask John H. to upload
  5. copy all of the /bcimnew-temp/ files into the /bcim/ account on LSBU Unix, over-writing any files with the same name but leaving intact any other files (especially the cgi-bin scripts).
At this point the new website will have been launched! It will need some serious scrutiny to make sure that everything is working as it should, but I don't anticipate any problems. I'm going to ask Mike to be around when I do the above just in case I need some help with any unforseen problems.

Subsequently I want to put redirection pages in locations where key pages (e.g. research centre pages) used to be, to avoid the possibility of broken links into our website from other websites. Here's what I plan to do for this...

  1. make a duplicate of /bcim-prelaunch/ (on my Mac) which I'll call /bcim-with-redirects/
  2. use the colour labelling feature of OS X (the operating system on my Mac) to label each of the files within /bcim-with-redirects/; the coloured labels will indicate that these are all old files
  3. copy all of the files in /bcimnew-temp/ to /bcim-with-redirects/ in such a way that the files in /bcim-with-redirects/ are either overwritten or left intact; any files that are overwritten will end up without colour labels in /bcim-with-redirects/, so that all of the files which remain with coloured labels can be clearly identifiable as old files
  4. decide which of these old files needs to be replaced by redirects to new web pages, and put those redirects in place within /bcim-with-redirects/ and also within the /bcim/ account on LSBU Unix
  5. rename /bcim-with-redirects/ to /bcim-postlaunch/
At the end of all this I'll have the following three local directories on my Mac (and backed up on a remotely-located external hard drive, of course!) for posterity: