Tidy Up!

This is a great time of year to close the books on things that didn't work out, and prepare to start new projects and make new beginnings in the year ahead.

Do you run a clean shop? Suppose your website has a dozen pages and thirty images or graphics. How many web pages are actually in your working directory? And how many photos and images are inside your images folder? Are you linking to a style sheet, or three?

Here's how I work: I start marking up pages and get to the point where I'm uncertain of how to proceed. Then I'll stop and do some heavy-duty thinking about my options. Very often, I need to actually see the alternatives. Maybe there are browser issues and what I want to do doesn't look or work right in one of the popular browsers. So I will actually copy the page I am working on and add a little sign to the name that tells me I can toss the file, eventually.

So login.shtml becomes boguslogin.shtml while I sketch out how the form is actually supposed to look and work. I get the fonts right. I monkey with the colors, and the spacing above and below, left and right. Try it with a frame and without. Maybe inside one of those fancy fieldsets. When everything is as I had hoped it would be, I copy and paste the trial-and-error results into the actual Web page, and go on to the next thing. If you have been paying attention, you'll notice that I didn't finish up by saying "And then I delete the old, dead, boguslogin.shtml page.

I have a lot of boguspage.html pages in my local directories—and by extension on the remote server. I always imagined that One Day I would get rid of them, but of course One Day never comes. I get a site working with an original stylesheet, add one of my own and then add an experimental stylesheet, linking to originalstyle.css and newstyles.css and to maybestyles.css. One day, I promise myself, I'll go through and clean up all of the duplicate style rules and get down to a single CSS page. That day never came, either.

But this year, before the break, I have actually scheduled time in my week to clean things up. I never thought much about this until looking over the shoulder of a coworker recently who was much closer to Felix Unger in personality than I am. It was amazing how much easier it was to work when you could see all of the files in the website, in the files list. It took no time at all to see the first page, the next three, and the two under those and imagine how they all fit together.

If you're like me and your workspace is full of output01.html, output02.html, output03.html and goodoutput.html, you could benefit from a little cleaning and consolidating, too, probably. Give it a try. You save a lot of time looking for files, and you will save a lot of server resources, too.

The coming new year is a great time to try to start new habits. This is one I'm going to work on very hard, in the year ahead.