sulfericacid,
I do not know anything about WWW programming, so I did not review this. I can tell you it looks much cleaner than your older code. I am not sure why you are using CGI if you are constructing most of the HTML yourself though?

This is in reference to the statement concerning not being able to use $variable = $value++; You should always consult perldoc - it is your friend.

From perldoc perlop
``++'' and ``--'' work as in C. That is, if placed before a variable, they increment or decrement the variable before returning the value, and if placed after, increment or decrement the variable after returning the value.

Cheers - L~R