Re-Visioning a Mental Health Directory

Hi! This is my first post. What great boards!

I have a resources area for mental health workers that want to keep up-to-date on their reading. It mainly has free online article and journal sources. I have bigillions of new items to add to it. I keep them in Action Outline, a convenient outliner that lets me organize them quickly.

It might be wise to database this project, but I don't really have time, and I already have everything organized in a multi-level outline.

However, I want to make updating as quick as possible and have it organized somewhat like Open Directory (same as Google Directories).

I will have subcategories on separate pages to create more diverse keywording for appropriate traffic.

My best thinking is to have Action Outline spit out HTML text with unique text between each category and do mass replacing to make it easy to use macros to pull each segment into a separate HTML page. I'd use server side includes for the repeating page elements.

Another idea would be to use XML regions and pull text in. That way, I could have one giant HTML page and only have to regenerate it in one step if I can get action outline to creat the region identifiers for XML.

The more I think about this, the more it sounds like a pain. I'd love to hear any thoughts about managing a directory. Maybe I should give up on Action Outline and learn to manage a database? Maybe there's a nice, cheap ASP? I'm in brainstorming mode, so anything goes.

Enjoy!

You may want to try searching for a ready made script. Would probably save you a bit of time. Here is one example . HTH.

Hi Jamie,

I was hating the idea of getting into script use, but after looking at the link you provided, the evidence is unquestionable. Gotta do it.

To have users add listing, ratings and reviews would make the directory a lot more valuable, and it would expand and be more up-to-date. It would be so much more of a pain to manage this without such a script, even though it is smaller then the less-niched directories.

Thanks again!

If anybody has any recommendations, please chime in!

I'm really looking forward to gettin my site up to speed.