Re: Seeing Perl in a new light

[Your Mother]

I went through the same thing; the "revelation" coming 1998-1999. I had coded up a pretty large site (something like 400 pages) in HTML by hand. I was an experienced editor so I was quite good with find/replace/copy/paste sorts of things and it seemed manageable. I discovered Perl. I rewrote everything with it. Then I did it again. Then part of it again. Then again. Then I stopped and learned a framework after having redone the whole thing anywhere from 2-6 times depending on the part of the site(s).

And that's both the problem and the meat. I *wish* I had been turned on to templating engines and frameworks sooner. TT2 would have steamrolled the first three revisions of the site(s), saving me probably a solid year's worth of work. But if I had picked up those things early I probably wouldn't be employed as a Perl hacker today because I wouldn't have developed both the chops (especially debugging chops) and the experience to know to never again write a line of code someone else already wrote with a test suite and a decent distribution.

So, have fun, but go slow with attacking problems with new code and ask here often about things you're doing. If I had discovered this place earlier, or even recognized its importance sooner after I did discover it, I could have gained the experience and chops much faster and with a lot less pain. :)

A tip: HTTP/CSS/XHTML/JS stuff is extremely valuable to doing good and quick web-work; and it's easier to confront if you admit it right away instead of fighting it and digging in with the Perl as a defense against it.

[Lady_Aleena]

Your Mother...Hopefully I will only need this one file to build the framework for all of the rest. I am thinking about naming it base.pl then do "base.pl" on every page of the site or something similar. If I understood the module making mojo, I would probably be able to use base, but that requires more than I know now.

The first thing I need to know is how to grab file and directory names. I haven't been able to find anything on google about getting things from the environment, if that is the correct term. Then I have to learn how to write a regex. Fun, fun, fun.

As for the other files, the ones that I do not want to include in the navigation, do not worry. I will still be using my css file, images, and any javascripts that can not be replaced with Perl. What I was discussing is where to put them. See below.

/root
 /files - Where everything that is not meant for the viewing public goes.

-or-

/root
 /css - Where my style sheet(s) will go. (I may break it up into smaller pieces.)
 /images - Where my images will go.
 /javascripts - Where my javascripts will go.
 /other - Where everything else that is not meant for the viewing public goes.

-or-

/root
 /files
  /css - Where my style sheet will go.
  /images - Where my images will go.
  /javascripts - Where my javascripts will go.
  /other - Where everything else that is not meant for the viewing public goes.

When I write the navigation, I will exclude those directories from it. I am just not sure which way I want to go right now. Currently, I have everything crammed into the root directory that is site wide like my style sheets, images, etc. I may go with the first or third option, since it would be easier to exclude just one directory, than four or more.