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.

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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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