Brand New Writers was started to promote the work new writing the world over, but was quickly adopted by Brent Writers (formally, the Willesden Green Writers Workshop) as their own.

With the support of Willesden Library Services and London Arts, BNW has been at the forefront of literature development in London. Supporting events such as 'Words Live' & 'Harrow In Words' (Harrow), 'Millennium' (Brent) and 'Diverse London'. The latter resulted in a London-wide short story competition and the publication of BNWs first anthology. A second competition and book is currently underway, with the title 'Beyond Words'.

The site has changed many times, either to incorporate new features and events, or to improve the look, feel and function of the site. The most consistent element, however, has been a short 'C' program to take the plain text stories and convert them into complete web pages. This is done off-line.

The program is quite simply, and has the following functions:

• Collate work (stories, poems, novels, etc) from their associated sub-directories and assign them to their authors
• Sort the authors into alphabetical order, then sort these lists into genres, to allow one page for poetry, one for stories, and so on
• Build cross-referencing links between the pages, and build 'biography' pages for prominent authors on the site
• Add standard 'templates' (containing the BNW stylings) to text pages containing news, information about writing groups and competitions.

The most recent change has been to utilise VBScript. Not in the processing (that's still done off-line with 'C'), but in the display.

The size of a typical page is about 4K. The auxiliary code for layout is about 10K. This amounts to a lot of wasted space. And unnecessary uploads. In 'poetry' for example (all genre pages are similar in structure), there are four main elements:

1. The title and menu
2. The poem/story, etc
3. A list of other work in the same genre
4. Copyright and footer

Now, the title and footers don't change often. The poem (once created) certainly doesn't, but the list of other work does.

Frequently.

Normally, this requires each page in that genre ('poetry', say, or 'short stories') be rebuilt and uploaded when a new poem or story is added. However, by splitting the page into four, and using VBScript, the four elements can be joined together using INCLUDE. This occurs dynamically when the page is requested. This in turn means any new story requires two uploads: one for the story, and one for the new list of stories!

The code looks similar to this:

<!-- #INCLUDE FILE="templates/cmn_header.asp" -->
<!-- #INCLUDE FILE="poetry/Triangle.asp" -->
<!-- #INCLUDE FILE="poetry_ListOfWork.asp" -->
<!-- #INCLUDE FILE="templates/cmn_footer.asp" -->

This benefits the webmaster in other ways. One of them is that you can near identical pages, with subtle changes. For instance, by creating a variable that consists of the poem name, and its author, you can include it in the <TITLE> tag very easily. This helps ranking on search engines, and gives the page a more individual - and therefore professional - feel.

For example, the file poetry/Triangle.asp might begin:

Whilst cmn_header.asp would include

This expands the 'szTitle' variable, giving the page a unique title.

Variables can be used to do more than just replace text. They can build small portions of your site. The menus on Brand New Writers are a good example of this.

Above, I said that 'cmn_header.asp' contained all the basic HTML startup code. That is true. However, it actually does a little more than that; it also includes the menu.

We have five menus on our site. Depending on which page you are viewing, the VBScript will determine which menu is applicable. Furthermore, each menu is composed of graphical buttons which use an alternative image when a visitor is viewing that particular page. I used 'home1.gif' for the 'Home Page' button, and 'home1b.gif' for the 'Home Page' button, when selected.

VBScript has instructions for testing the value of variables, as well as setting them. It can perform different actions if the variable is one thing, or if it is another. The command, if you hadn't guess, is called If! We can then write a simple piece of code to load a graphic, depending on the value of our variable,

Taking the above problem, let us solve it in two parts (buttons, then menus) and re-create our files, (Note: case is very important in VB, make sure you use capitals as indicated)

Now, when the web server reads 'cmn_header.asp' it can use the variable, 'iButtonSelected' to draw the button with the appropiate image. eg

You can also use this idea, to determine which menu to display, either as

or the following (which behaves in exactly the same way),

You can include the menu code, either by copying the 'if iButtonSelected = 2' code from above, or include a separate file for the menu.

There's a number of idea presented here. If you're not used to working in this fashion, it might require a little work to adapt your site to use it. But once you have done so, upgrading any part becomes a very simple operation.