Referencing & PHP/Mysql ideas?

Anon

I have a large database of articles written about music/fashion and general subjects of interest that has been stored under mysql.

The problem I have is that these pages are dynamic and only transformed in the fished HTLML after having being parsed, they are therefore seem to be completely invisible to the search engines and robot.

My question is the following, is there a way to make get the articles out from the database to be made available to the search engines, or generate static pages to be stored on the serveur where the robots will find them?

Anon

Read this article:

http://www.phpbuilder.com/columns/tim20000526.php3

Anon

We are following this article, but have come across our first stumbling block.

Our $DOCUMENT_HOME is /xx/xxx/public_html, the root for our web site.

So within this directory we created a directory /ref, this gives us the URL structure

www.modzik.com/ref/article/product

which we will use as our structure for our variable list provided in the URLs, but having created a directory ref in the $DOCUMENT_HOME we can't create a file called ref
Are we doing something wrong?

Anon

You don't need to create the directory. In fact you shouldn't create the directory. You file called ref will be accessed when someone trys to access the directory ref instead, this makes your urls look clean.

For an example see www.liquidcode.net/article/1. This is my site and it's under development, but you can see that it looks like you are entering a directory called article and accessing a file called 1, but you are actually calling a script called article and passing it an argument of 1, which is the id number of the article that you want to retrieve. I don't have a directory called article, just a file.

luddite

Rob, thanks, I now have this working, but do not understand something how on earth do the search engines work out that I have hundreds of URLs at the ready?

e.g.

www.openmag.fr/ref/article/595
or 596 or 597 etc etc to reference the site, they can't know all my database ids, can they?

Do I have to post something to the search engines to get them to look at the directory structure?

thanks
Julian

Anon

No what you do is tell the search engine about your main page, then you make sure you have a page that exists that lists all of the articles on your site. Then they can spider through all of the articles and list them.

All you need is the ability to get to any piece of information you have on your site from the main page, or some number of clicks from the main page. This will allow the search engine to walk through your site and get everything.