When I first started writing web pages, they were always static pages: straight HTML. If there was any CGI at all, it was only to handle forms. No doubt every beginning web master starts out that way, and if your web site never grows beyond a handful of pages, that's probably fine. However, as your site grows in complexity, static pages become burdensome and quite annoying to maintain.
One aside before we dive in completely: there is a technical difference between dynamic pages and generated pages that the rest of this article is going to generally ignore. A dynamic page has imbedded code (Javascript, Server Side Includes, or whatever) or may be generated completely from a CGI script. A generated page can be just static HTML as it sits on the server, but that HTML very well could have been created by a script or other program (and of course nothing prevents such a page from also including dynamic content). What sort of scheme you use to produce pages varies with your needs and preference; I use all methods myself and you probably will too.
For example, let's look at the various things that need to happen when I add a page to my site:
All of this is handled by Perl scripts. The generation of the style sheet classes and the copyright notice is just simple SSI (Server Side Includes): a line in each file has this, for example:
<!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/copyright.pl" -->
As you may already know, such a line (on a server that supports SSI) will cause the displayed web page to have the text generated by the script that it calls. The "copyright.pl" generates the boilerplate copyright, and a similar line generates the style sheets.
The rest of it all happens because one line that describes the article is added to a data file that a number of other programs read. That data file looks like this:
ARTICLES:/Unixart/linppp.html:Red Hat Linux as a PPP Server:January 1999:Tony Lawrence:Linux|Networking ARTICLES:/Opinion/java.html:Java? :January 1999:Tony Lawrence:Opinion ARTICLES:/Reviews/wt5.1.html:Winterm 5000 Terminal:January 1999:Tony Lawrence:Reviews|Modems/Terminals|Networking ARTICLES:/Reviews/proxyserv.html:Review of Netscape Proxy Server:February 1999:Tony Lawrence:Reviews|Security|Networking ... ARTICLES:/Unixart/linkfail.html:Kernel Link Failures:September 2000:Tony Lawrence:Installation|Kernel/Internals ARTICLES:/Reviews/logmon.html:Logmon Inactivity Reporter:September 2000:Tony Lawrence:Reviews ARTICLES:/Opinion/technofable.html:Technofable- James Richardson:September 2000:James Richardson:Opinion ARTICLES:/Linux/linrh70.html:Red Hat 7:October 2000:Tony Lawrence:Linux|Reviews ARTICLES:/Unixart/vdom_eng.html:Mail in a Virtual Domain:October 2000:Roberto Zini:Mail|Installation
Every index page gets information from this file by way of a Perl script. Additionally, every page shows pages related to itself by another script that also reads this file.
Got something to add? Send me email.
More Articles by Tony Lawrence © 2012-07-15 Tony Lawrence
AOL is like the cockroach left after the nuclear bomb hits. They know how to survive. (Jan Horsfall, VP of Marketing for Lycos)
Thu Jul 6 14:18:25 2006: 2218 TonyLawrence
A lot of this has changed. Nowadays, almost all pages here call a script that reads the real content from a database. This lets me have one script that I can modify to add or delete features and change presentation.
Wed Jul 7 20:25:07 2010: 8798 TonyLawrence
And even more recently, it has all been converted back to static. Perl scripts read all the databases to generate the pages, but I had to go to static because of increased traffic.
Wed Jul 7 20:26:46 2010: 8799 TonyLawrence
See (link) for why I use Perl rather than more structured languages.
------------------------
Printer Friendly Version
The AutoMagic Web Site Copyright © October 2000 Tony Lawrence
Have you tried Searching this site?
This is a Unix/Linux resource website. It contains technical articles about Unix, Linux and general computing related subjects, opinion, news, help files, how-to's, tutorials and more.
Contact us
Printer Friendly Version