[MacPerl] Planning for MacPerl web site maintenance

[David Rouse <cn1407@coastalnet.com>]

I'm planning to use MacPerl to help format HTML exported from a newspaper front
end system (i.e. big database of text files). I'd like the group's opinion on
the best way to setup the conversion system for the sake of reliability and ease
of future changes.

Most of the time the front end system would be told by a person -- export this
file to a folder on a 'Transporter' Mac, making a generic HTML conversion along
the way. The MacPerl system (living on the 'Transporter' Mac) would then
customize the HTML and move (via normal finder copy, not ftp) the page to the
right place on the web server (also a Mac). There would be about a dozen
specific pages on the web site that would be updated this way.

Note -- There is a possibility that the some of the exporting could be based on
an automated database query and could involve more than one file at a time.

The decisions I have (that I am aware of) are:

1) Use folder actions to trigger scripts or a cron utility?

2) Export all the files to one folder -- changing the names to reflect where in
our web site they should go -- or export to separate folders based on
destination and let MacPerl handle the renaming?

3) Use specialized scripts to handle each individual page or have one master
script that makes decisions based on what folder the file came from or what its
name is?

By the way, am I right in assuming that loading cgi generated pages from a Mac
server (8.1 AppleShare 6.0) would be much slower than pages generated by a
second Mac and then copied over, where the pages would normally be changed only
once a day?

David Rouse




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