Alternatively, find a champion. Instead of appealing directly to the Web Gods find an administrator or teacher that's willing to go to bat for you. You are insignificant and easy to say "no" to. A tenured full-professor is much harder for them to ignore. :-)

Instead of appealing directly to the Web Gods find an administrator or teacher that's willing to go to bat for you. You are insignificant and easy to say "no" to. A tenured full-professor is much harder for them to ignore. :-)

This is really directed at the OP, but I'm replying to that "get faculty backing thing". That may be the wrong way to go.

At larger universities, I think this is quite the opposite of reality. It is oft better to make friends with the web gods, join them, to get changes made. That's how Linux and IMAP became available at my college. Most improvements, in fact, have been from suggestions. Such large universities are probably using some very complicated mess to tie accounts together (AFS, etc), and have to contend with lots of security and reliability issues. Since your cgi-process can do many things (some of them worse than just runing your account space), they are wise to not allow it. Even "full tenured professors" are apt to be told "go run your own server", as the admins are right to do. Faculty might help in acquiring that server for you, though!

Our organization (campus ACM chapter) solved this problem of needing more sophisticated access by running our own server, just another Linux box in the office. From there, we could do just about whatever we wanted, but it took some doing to get a CNAME and to let the department serve up to us. In all, the whole deal worked out rather well.

You should really enjoy your campus web space. Using something for a local templating system before upload (as suggested above) can help you if you only have your web space to deal with.

The reason I would like it, my killer app, is because the people who I build it for do not understand the process of building and maintaining a website, so they come to me and want thing done, up, and running within a couple of seconds. They use surveys to get information to figure out what needs updating, and my idea is to cut out that middle man, and collect information with a perl scirpt, and have things updated quicker, and much more accurate because they use the old method of giving surveys using paper and ink and tallying the votes themselves. So, when they mess up, since I put it on the website, the blame gets dumped on me.

Instead of asking for full CGI abilities, start low and ask for SSI support (Server Side Includes). This will allow you to do many things to make your life easier like using the include directive to allow common headers and footers on the page.

It will also allow you to prove yourself in their eyes, and may lead to more access in the future...

SSI also has an 'exec' feature that allows you to execute CGI scripts, however that can usually be turned off.

- Cees

Something like Template-Skeleton perhaps? :)

http://template-toolkit.org/oscon2003/tt3tutorial/index.html along with http://template-toolkit.org/download/Template-Skeleton-0.01.tar.gz make for a great start (allows you to make your own http://wardley.org, or http://tt2.org/tt3).

MJD says "you can't just make shit up and expect the computer to know what you mean, retardo!"

I run a Win32 PPM repository for perl 5.6.x and 5.8.x -- I take requests (README).

** The third rule of perl club is a statement of fact: pod is sexy.

This would be circumventing the intent of your sys admin for the web box.

On a more helpful note, you can easily set up any computer to be a web server. Any old box will do, virtually any OS, although a Linux install would be a nature fit here. Taking this route you may circuvent objections rather easily.