[ILUG] Database backed web sites in Ireland

[John McCormac]

Niall wrote:
> 
> In your model, only sites which provide personalisation are database backed
> web sites. <snip>

Not exactly. The database backed site (as in what I was describing)
allows for extreme personalisation of the content and advertising. It
would be possible to do this with a site that has a combination of large
areas of static pages with only certain areas that are database backed
but it would not be as easy. Having a more or less completely database
backed site allows the content itself to be maintained automatically.
Thus it would be possible for online.ie to pull in content from its
content providers (easy), parse it (the complex part) and stuff it into
the database with the minimum of human intervention and then feed it
back out to the user. It is possible to do this automated content
provision on static pages though and just publish out at certain times
of the day.

Because the content and the user's path through that content are part of
the database, it would be possible with either user input or by
inference to provide the user with targeted content. A truly database
backed website would produce an alarming amount of data on the user's
preferences, dwell time on pages, click-thoughs, favourites, buddies
etc. Purely from a statistical point of view this information could
identify clusters of people who are interested in the same thing, know
each other and the kind of purchases that would appeal to them. It is a
frightening amount of power if harnessed properly but it would require a
lot of mathematics. 

> > However putting the whole site inside the database and then generating
> > the pages on the fly is a completely different affair.
> 
> Online doesn't do this - they have a number of static pages. slidefile.ie
> has a number of static pages, but is also essentially a user interface to a
> database. www.inpho.ie has exactly 5 static pages, which all have static
> information (e.g. a help page)

However the bulk of the online.ie website is included in the database as
inpho.ie so the few pages outside the database doesn't really change the
argument considering that there are thousands of pages/elements in the
databases.

> Yes, but at the moment, you still only get the same resultant static view of
> their content. online doesn't allow you to "access the database of webpages
> directly". I know online is going to change from that model. However,

By accessing the database directly, I mean read-only access unless they
are given r/w access to build their own site. However I think that the
most frequently accessed pages would be cached in RAM. There is a
memoize function in the ACS (and I think an AOLserver ADP function) that
allows data/pages to be cached in memory. However the data is pulled
from the database initially. 

> ireland.com right now allows me to do historical searches - I think this
> counts to some extent as "access(ing) the database of webpages directly"
> online.ie does not provide this facility, or if they do, they have it well
> hidden.

I am not sure if they have the whole of the paper's back issues in a
database per se (it could be argued that the file system is a database
however in this case it would be stretching the point a bit). It seems
that the archive database has just indexed the archive of webpages which
are user accessible and the archive search allows you to do a full text
search through that database rather than the back issues. EG: Searching
for an Amazon.com article in the IT ran the results through a
highlighting script but the original article is on.
http://www.ireland.com/newspaper/finance/2000/0303/seven9.htm 

Regards...jmcc
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John McCormac            * Hack Watch News
jmcc at hackwatch.com       * 22 Viewmount, 
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