July 30, 2004

Some hammer fixing

  • Manning Grinnan introduced me to the term "fixing the hammer." That's when you spend a significant amount of time trying to make a tool work that (you think) you need in order to solve the real problem that's interrupting your main task.
  • In this case, I had multiple layers of hammers to fix.
    • First, I think I want to implement the menus on the sign-in, sign-up, etc pages.
    • So I tried to get the .cgi to work from within the .htm. That worked for the initial call. But the script calls itself, and the nested calls don't work quite right.
  • So that means faking SSI from within the Perl script.
    • First, I tried to implement that myself. I can see where they're reading in the template files. But the syntax of Perl is still opaque to me.
    • So I started searching on the net for how others had solved this. I found the file mentioned in my previous post. It looks like overkill, but it appeared once I got it working it would be very easy to incorporate.
  • That meant learning how to use a package in Perl on my server
    • I had several obstacles. I misread the error log and mistook /www/u/username with /www/d/o/domain.com
    • Then I learned I needed
      BEGIN { push(@INC,'/www/U/USERNAME/whatever'); }
      use CGI:SSI;
    • I was still getting errors, so I was shown
      open(STDERR,">ERROR.txt"); # You get error messages in ERROR.txt
      for getting error output to a file where I could read it
    • Then this person suggested making a simple-simple file that uses the script I'm trying to incorporate.
  • Those finally got things to the point where I could see what was wrong. My new CGI::SSI script had a few scripts that it depended on. It turns out there were only three.
    HTML::SimpleParse
    Date::Format
    Time::Zone
    I downloaded those one at a time as they produced error messages
  • And finally, it's working. Now to tidy up
Posted by Mighty at July 30, 2004 06:32 AM