IF Archive index update

General IF Community Resources
1

I’ve just pushed out an update to the IF Archive index pages.

The big visible change is that the top-level directory list now has descriptions. It’s not just a list of unexplained directory names. Same goes for the games folder and some others.

snap

Credit to Dan Fabulich, who came up with most of the new descriptive text.

This is a modest change on the surface, but it required quite a deep rewrite of the index generator. (Which has some really antique logic, dating back to a terrible hack I wrote in C about 25 years ago…)

I think everything is properly updated. But I might have broken, well, practically anything. If you discover any malformed HTML or flaky navigation, please let us know!

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2

I’m glad to see the minicomp directory. I should be immersing myself there in the future.

Edit: I don’t see ScottKit (Scott Adams game compiler) in the ScottAdams directory.

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This by itself is great! Was exhausting guessing for a while.

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Not few directories’s indexes containing sub-dirs are still not updated, but I think that this update is an excellent step ahead in aids to navigation in the IF archive.

Best regards from Italy,
dott. Piergiorgio.

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We’ve only updated a few of the subdirectory descriptions. The volunteers can work on that incrementally over time.

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Another step in this update:

The index pages used to have URLs like https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archiveXgamesXzcode.html, with the slashes replaced by X’s.

These have been deprecated for a few years; we now link to sensible URLs like https://ifarchive.org/indexes/if-archive/games/zcode/. However, the old URLs still worked, for backwards compatibility.

I have now turned the old (X-ified) URLs into HTTP redirects. If you visit one, you’ll land at the modern URL. So they still work, but it’s a lot tidier on the server side.

Once again, “this shouldn’t break anything”. (I’ve been surprised before by changes that shouldn’t break anything.)

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