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 06:32 AM

July 28, 2004

SSI, again

  • Trying to use http://search.cpan.org/~james/CGI-SSI-0.53/SSI.pm
  • The Perl primer I used was http://blob.perl.org/books/impatient-perl/iperl.html
Posted by Mighty at 03:13 AM

July 22, 2004

Working on emails

  • Editing the emails that are sent out by the authentication system on account request, authorization, password request, etc
  • Man, the capitalization and template text is remarkably inconsistent.
  • Things like, one will say "Your-Site.Com" and another will say "www.website.com". Kinda bizarre, really
  • It's also strange that most of the emails are in standalone files and some are embedded inside the .cgi. I prolly ought to split those out, someday.
  • Don't forget a bugbug in the .cgi. It's there to remind me to update the user center url when I get that finished
  • I thought I had figured out a way to deal with having only one adminemail address for Password Manager. I was going to set up a filter in my email program to auto-forward certain subject lines. But that requires me to get mail from this computer. I guess what we're going to have to do is set up a distribution list from within christensen.com's email server. And then the CSRs can filter out the stuff they don't want. I'll see if I can come up with unique subject lines they can filter on.
Posted by Mighty at 04:03 PM

July 20, 2004

Moving stuff again

  • I asked on the newsgroup and the only answer I got back was to keep parallel menu SSIs that point to different image directories. I really don't want to do that, but I suppose I can.
  • Having trouble getting the template to do a substitution inside of an include statement. I suppose I should just make it editable and change it manually. It doesn't really save anything to do it with a template parm.
  • Hmm, somehow, a most of the pages got disassociated with the template. I'm having to reapply the template to each page individually
  • No, they're associated. But they didn't get updated with the latest changes. It's still something I have to do to each page, but it's fewer clicks
  • And having just typed that, the rest had been updated. Strange
  • Uploaded everything and cleaned out old directories on the server.
  • Cleaned up some stuff in the CSS that wasn't handled correctly automagically
Posted by Mighty at 07:27 PM

July 12, 2004

Moving things around

  • Moved m2img folder to under the customer and public folders. Updated all files to use the new arrangement
  • I'm not certain this is going to work. I'm wondering if the template files used by the authentication system will end up looking in the wrong place for the images.
  • Hmm. The biggest problem seems to be that if I ever get a 401 error then it can't see the image files. It needs about 70 clicks on the cancel button before getting to the page, and that just leave text on the left. And mousing over them causes another 18 clicks.
  • As I was typing up a question to the P7 forum it occurred to me there's no way to make the m2img folder open, since the browser isn't allowed to even know there's a m2img folder within /customers. I guess I need to look into some sort of runtime substitution in order to point to two different directories to pull images from
Posted by Mighty at 03:10 PM

July 10, 2004

Been awhile

  • I got so stuck on trying to add include capability to the authentication that I haven't posted here in forever. It shouldn't be that hard. But I've kind of ground to a halt. So I've decided to set that aside for a week or so and actually get some visible stuff done.
  • Cosmetic - Dividers or something in flyouts
  • Cosmetic - Split long pages into multiple pages
  • Editor's Guide - Full Composition
  • Editor's Guide - Parital Composition
  • Editor's Guide - Camera Ready Files
  • Editor's Guide - Camera Ready Repro
  • Editor's Guide - Mailing List Processing
  • Added Working Days and Zero Correction Option to Glossary
  • Removed bugbug regarding printer codes from glossary
  • Set up a subdomain, jci.mightydrake.com, to simplify directory structure. This way it'll match more closely the final layout. Testing will be more straightforward and will be a lot less likely to break when I post it to the real server.
  • Moved all the customer pages to the customers directory. Tested each page and verified that the links are correct
  • Using Rewrite in .htaccess to point accesses to /index to public/index and from customers/index to customers/customersection. It's works great
  • Tidying up checklist and bringing it up to day
  • Updated links to/from Distiller screenshots in PDF Creation pages
Posted by Mighty at 01:39 AM