P.Mean: How many files are in this new website? (created 2008-06-24).

This page is moving to a new website.

1,192, I think. It's tricky to get an exact count on the number of pages on this website. I could count the number of files, but many of these files perform support operations and do not themselves display directly on the page. Other files, of course, are images used within a page.

An earlier count listed the number of pages at around 800 or around 1400. The latest count came when I stripped out header information that was needed at the old StATS site, but which is not needed at the P.Mean site. A global replace command made this change in 1,192 files.

I want to adopt a common format for these files. Here are some of the things I need to do:

  1. The title for every page should start with "P.Mean:". This helps me when I create links to recognize which links are internal and which links are external. I'm also hoping that these titles will help remind people when they bookmark my pages that they come from the
  2. Every file should have a creation date listed prominently. This helps me maintain an orderly archive. Also, I've been irritated at times when I read a webpage about a topic that I think is very current, but find out at the bottom of the page (if I find out at all) that the comments were written five years ago and ignore a lot of important developments that have come out since then. Five year old advice is not always bad advice, of course, but in areas that are moving quickly, you need to know how current the advice is.

The footer at the end of each file needs some common elements.

  1. A link to the Creative Commons license. I want to encourage people to use my material freely, as long as they acknowledge the original source.
  2. An acknowledgement of the original source for any page originally written for the StATS website. About six months ago, I placed all of the content of the StATS website under an open source license which allows me to freely use all that material at my new website. I do need to acknowledge the original source, of course. Note that this page was created after the move to the new website, so it does not need this acknowledgement.
  3. A link to general help resources. I want to help people with their questions about Statistics, and if the particular page does not answer their question, then they can jump to a page that allows for a site-wide search of my content, an email link and so forth.
  4. A link to one or more specific category pages. About two years ago, I decided that I needed a simple way to organize all the pages associated with a particular topic. There are about 75 of these categories as of June 2008, and you can review the full list of categories at P.Mean: Archive organized by category (created 2006-07-07). Every page on my website (well, almost every page) has a link at the bottom to usually just one, but sometime two or three categories.

There are other important changes:

  1. I also want to update the links to articles and websites to use a common format. In particular, I want a brief annotation or excerpt for each of these. I'm still wrestling with how to do this effectively and efficiently.
  2. I am also re-organizing and simplifying the file structure of this site. Each file will be stored in a folder according to the year the file was created. This file, for example, is stored in the 08 folder. Chainging the structure will end up breaking some internal links, and I am try to fix these quickly.
  3. Finally, I am abandoning the Active Serve Page (.asp) format and sticking with plain vanilla html (.html).

All of this will take time, so please be patient.

Creative Commons License This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 United States License. This page was written by Steve Simon and was last modified on 2010-04-01. Need more information? I have a page with general help resources. You can also browse for pages similar to this one at Category: Website details.