Well, this site was down most of today, thanks to our friends in Seattle. I've been using FrontPage for a couple of weeks as a web editor--not too bad, actually. I had imported into FrontPage the bulk of the files on lint-trap.com, but hadn't published them (pushed them back onto the web server). The reason is that I had a Perl program that makes sure all the links are OK, and it wouldn't work with the relative links I was promised FrontPage would create for me. I didn't want to hack this program until my satellite link was in, since my voice grade line was dying every five minutes or so. Blech.
Anyhow, today was the big day. I published my site, fired up my browser, and it looked fine. I made a couple of minor changes, republished, and only the changed files were shipped over. Yippee.
Not.
As I was looking in my browser, I noticed that the links to BACK and NEXT were pointing into my machine, not on the web host machine at all. In fact, they were "file:" URLs, not "http:" URLs, so they were pointing into the file system of the machine running the browser. So while it looked great for me on my machine, everyone else would see trash.
Further examination showed that every single link was screwed up. They did a very complete job!
Once again, it was Perl to the rescue. About 40 lines later, I had a program that would not only clean up the mess made by our friends in Redmond, but would actually link each entry to the previous and next ones as needed without intervention by yours truly. So there was a silver lining on this particular cloud.
I do apologize for the messed up links, and assure you that it will be a cold day in Hell before that program messes with any of my links again. Do read the last several entries if you missed them--there's some great news!
I'm actually working up to a bit of a hiatus--I'll be in Boston and LA from Sat. AM until the first Monday in July. I may be able to update from Boston, but I wouldn't count on it. And we are coming to the end of the workshop I've been volunteering with--graduation is Fri. A busy week, but a very satisfying one. Any week that starts with Aida and ends with Clam Chowder can't be all that bad...
Thank you for reading.
Copyright © 2001 Pete Stevens. All rights reserved.
BACK NEXT HOME