Re: NTLK What happened to the Newton Classifieds??!?

From: Bill Davis (newton@ecity.net)
Date: Fri Jan 14 2000 - 02:38:39 EST


On 1/13/2000 7:10 AM, Victor Rehorst [mailto:victor@gear.torque.net]
wrote:

>
>> >And if it does happen to have passed on, I'm sure one of the active Newton
>> >websites could pick it up. IMO it was a very very useful and
>> >highly-trafficed siteite (also where I found the ad for my UMP2k!)
>>
>> Maybe you? Are you using CGI's on your site for the NewtonTalk archive
>> stuff? I have the capability with my Webstar server but have never done
>> it....
>
>Yeah, maybe me :) The only CGI I'm using on my site is WWWBoard, which is
>a free script available out on the web. The archive is made up of static
>pages generated and updated by HyperMail every night (I'm currently
>working on getting this to update per-message!)
>
>I could probably create a new Newton Resources. I have friends who have
>experience in actually writing CGIs (as opposed to me, as I haven't yet
>put my nose to the grindstone and learned Perl, yet).

You mean a new Newton Classifieds, right? (Perhaps we could just get the
site/scripts from the creator of Newton Classifieds if he isn't going to
put it back up, though, or find a free script that does something
similar. There are plenty of free Perl and other CGI's out there!

I heavily modified (ultimately almost rewrote) a search engine script
written in Perl 2-3 years ago for the company I worked for at the time (I
think I may have got it from the same place you got WWWBoard, it sounds
familiar -- Matt's Script Archive?) and also did several Perl scripts to
take data from a web form and write them to a tab-delimited file for
import into FileMaker (even handling multi-line fields properly).

Perl is pretty cool and you can get going quickly....but it also has a
lot of cryptic constructs and such which, while VERY powerful, took me
quite a bit of headscratching sometimes when looking at someone else's
code, to figure out what the HECK they were doing. It can be as bad as
trying to figure out someone ELSE's grep regular expression or APL
program, sometimes. ;-)

But I was able to successfully modify Perl scripts relatively quickly,
with just a bit of perusing of a "cheat sheet" and reading the first few
chapters of a perl book (plus referring to the language reference) which
is all I had time for. I got the O'Reilly book by the creator(s) of
Perl. (Just recently got their JavaScript reference and <horrors!> Palm
Programming reference, too. Love their books).

This was on a Digital Unix box, though, and an Apache web server, not on
my Mac with Webstar. I didn't have to set up Perl, etc, it was already
done by my old company's ISP. I have a feeling it'd run a bit slower on
my ancient 100Mhz PowerPC 603e Mac server.....

 - Bill

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