LateNightHacking About

Auth

I've always found it hard to figure out how to lay out a site. It often seems like things should go in more than one place.

Then there's the whole depth vs. breadth problem. I first heard about it in a biology book. The book described two different camps of taxonimists - the splitters and the groupers. The splitters like to branch early in the classification hierarchy, thus producing a wide, shallow tree. The groupers are the opposite - they like to keep related animals grouped as long as possible, resulting in a narrow but deep tree.

I have since run across the problem many times. It crops up when organizing my files on my harddrive and organizing my web site. It's a challenge that must be faced when maintaining Java packages and any OO class hierarchy. It's a problem in source control systems during branching and merging. I guess it happens any time you attempt to impose a strict hierarchy on something which is only loosely hierarchichal. :)

• (root) - home page
  • maint - site maintenance scripts
  • common - common files that are usually included into other pages: footers, often used scripts
  • aboutSite - information about this site: describing the layout, the servers, the scripts
  • louisth - stuff that pertains to me
    • personal - bio, personal favorites, etc
    • album - photos
    • log - weblog
  • toolbox - links to useful utilities
  • projects - projects hosted on this site
    • year - projects will be organized by year
  • archives - stuff that I'm saving
    • stories
      • arranged by author or authoring group
    • art
    • reference
  • anonUpload - scripts to allow anonymous upload
  • changes - data files displaying recen chage history