-----Original Message-----
From:	Ben Russo [SMTP:i.am.ben(at)sympatico.ca]
Sent:	Monday, August 07, 2000 2:55 PM
To:	HWG Techniques
Subject:	Flying Llamas is almost up...

Hey guys!

I finally got some hosting from GX Hosting.  I'm still on the trial =
thing,
so if anyone knows of any problems with GX, please let me know soon...

Anyway, going on with the plan of creating this wonderful site, I'm now =
able
to enter the CGI stage of it all.  Now we're talking major problems =
ahead.
First thing's first: Does anyone know of an EXCELLENT tutorial for
fast-learning beginners?  Does anyone know of any books for it?

I'm also going to need some help with setting up these scripts.  GX can =
help
with the scripts they give me, but I plan to use more than they give me.
Here's the layout of what I'm going to be using:

- A page updater to update the daily pages at midnight (or something)
- A parse script to separate the daily stuff from it's surroundings.
- A banner rotator that I can be specific about (eg. show bannerx more =
than
bannery)
- Anything else you think I'll need... : )

If you haven't seen the site yet, it's at
http://www3.sympatico.ca/benjamin.russo/
(Dave's intro is a wierd one, please don't take offence.  I'm glad he =
wrote
the theatre thing now when nobody knows about the site...)

If you need to know, I have my own cgi-bin already installed.

Thanks in advance...

Ben

Hi, Ben,

OK, first off CGI is a protocol, not a programming language, so you =
haven't really supplied all the details we need to answer your =
questions.

But that means that I get to chose which language you're going to use, =
right?  :)  With that in mind, I'm going to direct you to my favorite =
language for CGI use, perl.  If you decide to use perl for your =
programming, THE book to get is "Programming Perl" by Larry Wall, et al. =
 It's also known as the "camel book," and it just went into its third =
edition.  It is available at http://perl.ora.com.  You will find lots of =
help here from me and several others here (Peter Newton immediately =
comes to mind), and you can also ask your questions on the newsgroups, =
like comp.infosystems.www.authoring.cgi (although, don't assume that =
people will know perl) and comp.lang.perl.misc (although, don't assume =
that people will know cgi).

The first two functions you listed (the administrative, no user around =
sort of things) are classical perl functions-no cgi needed.

The banner rotator can be simple or complex.  I've designed a complex =
system which includes time of day, day of week, etc. functions as well =
which allows certain ads to be shown at different ratios at different =
times.  Most need not be this complex.  You might check =
http://cgi.resourceindex.com to see if there's anything there which will =
be of use to you.  (However, I would recommend you ask a more =
experienced programmer to review the script before you deploy it-I found =
a password protection program on that site which allowed you in if you =
simply didn't supply a username and password.)

HTH,

Brian A. Sayrs
Owner, Southwind Solutions

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