Re: articles in database ????

hi andreas and jeff, indexability by search engines was indeed oine of my great concerns....... from what i understand andreas, you are suggesting i write a show.php script which has the task of displaying articles given the information one has given it. For exapmle if the query string was: http://www.magazine.com/show.php?article=bill gates bites,author="john%20doe" show.php would then output html with the title "bill gates bites by JohnDoe", which would then be indexable by search engines....... is that what you meant ? (but in that case, how would you get the url to reflect that change ? Meaning how do you get http://www.magazine.com/billgatebites.php instead of the above ?) cheers for all the responses, nick > Jeff Gannaway wrote: > > > > At 03:43 PM 7/17/00 +0100, Nick wrote: > > >Basically, I was hesitating about whether to put stuff like the actual > > article text (BLOLB/ TEXT) directly into the databse, or whether to put it > > in a seperate TXT or HTML file in a sepcified directory, bearing in mind > > the articles would have to be searchable. > > > > Without knowing in advance the size and quantity of articles, my > > inclination would be to avoid putting them inside the database for these > > reasons: > > > > 1. You can write a text search function that would read the articles for > > occurrences of a string using the > > strstr command. > > Right, but a database can search the articles as well. And probably do > so faster. > > > 2. Assuming this is for a public site, there would be MANY benefits to > > making your articles indexable by other search engines, namely more traffic > > to your site :) > > Not sure I follow this argument. Regardless of how you store the > articles, they would be retrievable with a URL. If the concern is that > some search engines don't index pages with query strings, you just > quickly set up Apache w/ mod_rewrite such as: > > RewriteRule ^/articles/(.*)$ /articles/show.php?art=$1 [P] > > Which would convert the article information to a query string for your > php script "show.php". > > Ciao, > > Andreas >