in reply to Re: Searches
in thread Searches

Kind of makes you wonder, though, if there isn't a market for "plug and play" style solutions that aren't so terribly bad as the one's on Matt's site. I mean, like how hard is it to put up (say) a basic, no frills, easy to setup guestbook that does not (at worst) open your server to obvious security holes or (at best) continue a culture of poor programming?

But I think you're right... Matt's Archive has become a meme that just won't go away, no matter how substandard it is.

Gary Blackburn
Trained Killer

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(Coyote) Re: Re: Re: Searches
by Coyote (Deacon) on Feb 18, 2001 at 01:09 UTC
    I remember a project mentioned on comp.lang.perl.misc about a year ago to rewrite some of the horrid scripts out there. I don't know if this ever made it out of the planning stages. Unfortunately, they called the project CRAP. I'm not sure what the acronym stood for, but it makes it almost impossible to find any information about it via the usual web searches.

    As an aside, maybe we should create some basic tutorials on how to create a guestbook, form mailer, page counter, etc. since these things come up pretty often for new users. It seems like the monastery would be the perfect place for such a thing since we have a wealth of good programmers and an incredibly effective peer review system.

    ----
    Coyote

[reply]

      This was japhy's project. He renamed it to SOAP (Stamp Out Awful Perl), but I don't know what happened to it then.

      --
      <http://www.dave.org.uk>

      "Perl makes the fun jobs fun
      and the boring jobs bearable" - me

[reply]
      I have to disagree with the last part...
        I think that this will change the "face" of the monastery to become like any commercial site, and stray away from the feel of the community that is going on around here..

      Please don't make the monastery a place for trading guestbooks, and form mailers...

      I agree with the tutorials part...

      Chady | http://chady.net/
[reply]
        Perhaps I should clarify my position a bit. I'm not suggesting that the monestary should become a flea market for page counters and form mailers. I am suggesting we teach people how to accomplish common cgi tasks with the assumption that we are writting tutorials for people who have limited experience with perl and limited resources to deal with. For example, I think we should have a tutorial on how to build a cgi guestbook using only the tools available with the standard perl distribution (i.e., cgi.pm, text files; no access to MySQL or another RDBMS). Maybe we should have tutorials that focus on accomplishing these tasks on Win32 since alot of these questions originate from that platform. It's the whole teach a man to fish thing.

        ----
        Coyote

[reply]
Re: Re: Re: Searches
by sierrathedog04 (Hermit) on Feb 18, 2001 at 18:22 UTC
    Yikes! I typed "guestbook perl" into google.com and sure enough the top link returned was a guestbook that said it was written with code from Matt's Script Archive.

    If even Google.com, which I consider the prince of search engines, gets it wrong then what hope is there?

[reply]

      Unfortunately, Google is doing the right thing there. It's returning the web page that most people want when searching for Perl guestbooks. You can't expect Google to give a qualitative analysis of the data at each the links it lists :(

      --
      <http://www.dave.org.uk>

      "Perl makes the fun jobs fun
      and the boring jobs bearable" - me

[reply]

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