ITSS WebDev Guide

2 Creating your site : Setting expiration dates

Setting document expiration dates

The web is a great way to disseminate information to a wide audience of people. It's interactive, colorful, up-to-date...

Wait a minute - did I say up-to-date?

The great beauty of the web is the capability it gives you to provide the most up-to-the-minuteinfo to your readers, any time, day or night. New product releases, schedule changes, bug fixes, the latest news on your favorite celebrity's misadventures - whatever it is, you can get it to your readers NOW, without the usual printing and processing delays of paper information.

However, this capability is also the web's curse. Your readers expect (rightly so) that the information they read on the web is timely and accurate. We've all been to sites that are outdated and out of touch - it's frustrating for the web user.

Unfortunately, keeping your web pages up-to-date takes a good deal of time and effort. And while you may have the best intentions about reviewing and updating your pages "on a regular basis" or "some day" or "as needed", it's easy to forget these intentions in the larger scheme of things.

One way to remind yourself to review your UMD web pages is to set an expiration date for a particular page. When the expiration date is reached, you will automatically receive an e-mail message (daily) reminding you of that fact - until you update the expiration tag. The "expiration date" you set is not tied to the revision date of the file (which is automatically updated every time you make a change). This allows you to make minor changes to the file and still be reminded to review the content of the file, say, every month or every 3 months (or weekly, for information that changes a lot).

The expiration tag is part of the HTTDig search engine we run at UMD, so it will only work on pages located on our UMD web server (www.d.umn.edu). Also, since pages in individual user's directories (/~jdoe) are not searched this tag will not work with them.

A sample of the message that is e-mailed to you is:

    The following page was tagged to notify you after 12/01/1998

    URL:     http://www.d.umn.edu/itss/docs/novell/
    Date:    12/01/1998
    Subject: Review Novell docs
    Email:   jdoe@d.umn.edu

    Note: This message will be sent again if you do not change or
    take away the notification of the above mentioned HTML page.

    HTDig Notification Service

If you have a page on our web server, you can set an expiration date by adding the following tags between the <head> and </head> tags:

 <meta name="htdig-email" content="xxxxxxxx@d.umn.edu">
 <meta name="htdig-email-subject" content="yyyyyyyy">
 <meta name="htdig-notification-date" content="06/30/2003">

Use the following values:

For xxxxxxxx, enter username of person to whom the e-mail reminder will be sent
For yyyyyyyy, enter what you'd like to see as the subject line on the e-mail reminder (for example: review WebDev Guide)
For notification date, enter the date you want to start receiving e-mail reminders

In general, you shouldn't put this tag on EVERY web page you create; save it for the main page of a section (usually index.html) as a reminder to check that page and its links.

If you have questions about using this tag, please contact our Help Desk (x8847).

Rev: sab 06.08 xs

Inside WebDev Guide

ITSS WebDev Guide

Setting document expiration dates