Outsource this task to your local library by donating all but your frequently needed reference books there.
Then you can easily browse the shelves, use a computerized search search system, or even ask a live person for help. You'll even been able to find books you didn't even own before. All for free!
As a Perl programmer, I tried Interchange before osCommerce. I found Interchange difficult and slow to work with, often making it more difficult to customize than writing code from scratch. See the details I wrote about What's wrong with Interchange. That's been awhile ago. Maybe it has grown into something I'd like better.
Keep in mind Interchange grew out of a time when the web was wild and young, and pre-packaged e-commerce options were few.
These days, Perl's CPAN offers a tremendous amount more in the way of high quality building blocks for such a project, but nothing I'm aware of has been built with this approach with a feature-set that comes close to rivaling osCommerce. Handel is start, but only covers basic shopping cart functions now.
Sure, using RoR or Perl's CGI::Application framework will lead to cleaner code.
The appeal of osC is the 2000 contributions that are available for free as extensions. Having helped several people set up stores with it, basically whatever customization people want, someone else has already made it and published it for free, so there has been a very low cost to get started with osCommerce for each store.
Still, I agree it can be painful and scary to work with. I miss automated test suite, like I'm using to building based on Perl's Test::WWW::Mechanize. It pains to me to hand apply a patch that doesn't come as a diff, but a series of instructions like "Around line 23, notice this code and add this line....".
In the short term, I support osCommerce for pragmatic reasons. For the longer term, I encourage developers to continue to build cleaner solutions from the ground up. For Perl, see Handel as a starting point.
In the world of Perl module development, automated testing plays an important role. As a gatekeeper myself, I often request that a code patch also come with an automated test, and the contributors often follow-up with one, if they didn't supply it in the first place.
In the Pugs project, the coders and testers are generally different people, when the tests being written first.
I'm fairly ignorant about the kernel development process, so I ask: could automated testing play a greater role in the quality assurance of the project?
Not in this case. The newspaper changed their mind for other reasons. As it turned out, the file formats didn't slow us down much while the project was active.
I once worked on a research project for a newspaper to investigate voter fraud.
To start, they used open records requests to get the details of people who recently voted, and details of those who recently died.
The goal was to find people who continued to vote after they died, which may sound funny, but is still happening.
The data the government data gave us was on magnetic reels. The data on the reels was stored in a fixed-width EBCDIC format. Talk about a dead format!
It turned out the local college still had a working magnetic reel reader, and was able to help me get the data out of EBCDIC into ASCII, but the project was cancelled anyway.
I recommend Summersault:
I co-founded this business about 8 years ago. We built up our hosting business slowly with reasonable prices and great customer service.
Until we upgraded the OS recently, we had 480 days uptime on our primary web server.
(I'm the author of the article.) I'm still learning about XSLT, but I know it can be used for the kind of "dreamweaver style" templates I described, and the basics do not seem particularly hard to learn.
What I'm less clear about it is how one might implement some of the "value added" features that tt2site has, such automatically building a menu system for the site, including highlighting your current location in it.
I'm interested to learn more about XML+XSLT as a templating solution.
I suggested using 'ttree', which you can run without any Perl knowledge. The key that you need to learn is really some basic syntax for "Template Toolkit" templates, which is meant to be very simple.
This solution worked well for me. If you have other suggestions for systems that work like the Dreamweaver templating system, I'm interested to hear them. But I don't count include files!
As the author, you missed a key point in the article. It's not about alternatives to Dreamweaver, it's an alternative to the way Dreamweaver implements templating.
I would expect people to still use a visual editor, such as NVU for visual work.
tt2site, which is based on tt2ttree, is currently under-documented, but looks like it could shape up to be a fairly easy to use templating solution, requiring minimal use of the command line. (Until someone writes some GUI hooks to run it from Quanta).
Most of the web pages I develop are database driven. I use the WWW::Mechanize module as part of an automated testing solution.
To manually test websites, I run Linux on my desktop. This allows me to test Windows/IE via WINE, as well as Mozilla and Konqueror (which should render like Safari).
It doesn't catch every issue, but it works well for me.
Although you don't state it explicitly, it's implied that you want a shell account on an internet connected server. This implies that actually connecting to the internet is not a problem.
So why not just have your unix shell account on your desktop machine? If you are not already using Mac or Linux, it's easy to create a dual-boot with the Mandrake install CDs, or have a portable solution with a Knoppix CD and a USB stick.
After trying digital sticky notes and formal solutions like Korganizer, I've gone
back to using a basic text file in my favorite text editor, vim.
vim has as "outline" mode, which looks like it could make it even more useful, but I haven't try migrated to it.
I used to think that this solution was too low-tech to be especially useful. However, I found all the more formal solutions I tried felt too clumsy. Because they were slower to use, I didn't use them.
As a programmer, I always have the text editor open and can search and organize the text document easily.
Try starting your own business. Either you'll do things differently so they aren't as stressful, or you'll still be stressed out, with the realization that it has more to with your own decisions.
I've recently been using w3m a lot more recently and highly recommend it. It supports a number of vi-like and emacs-like keystrokes if you are into that kind of thing. It also has a number of other noteworthy features:
- Although it's console based, it can display images. This is a really neat trick. It's actually using X11 to overlay images on the console. It even works when w3m is in a remote terminal, as long as X11 is forwarded back.
- It supports tabbed browsing.
- SSL support
- It supports tables and frames, so it generally renders pages decently.
- It has "incremental search", like Mozilla's type-ahead-find.
- Generally excellent keyboard navigation
- It's easy to switch to an external graphical browser if you need one. I use w3m on my Mac, and just press "M" to have it open the current page in Safari.
- It allows you to use your editor-of-choice to edit textareas. I imagine you could use a graphical editor with it
I use it frequently as a general purpose browser now, switching to a browser that supports graphics and javascript if I need to.
w3m seems to be a generation ahead of 'lynx'. It's quite impressive.
My favorite typing program has been Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor. It seems really effective, and was also somewhat 'fun'. It's available for Mac, Linux and that other OS.
Slashdot Mirror
Outsource this task to your local library by donating all but your frequently needed reference books there.
Then you can easily browse the shelves, use a computerized search search system, or even ask a live person for help. You'll even been able to find books you didn't even own before. All for free!
Apparently you didn't get the memo: Justin Simoni is the next big thing.
Keep in mind Interchange grew out of a time when the web was wild and young, and pre-packaged e-commerce options were few.
These days, Perl's CPAN offers a tremendous amount more in the way of high quality building blocks for such a project, but nothing I'm aware of has been built with this approach with a feature-set that comes close to rivaling osCommerce. Handel is start, but only covers basic shopping cart functions now.
The appeal of osC is the 2000 contributions that are available for free as extensions. Having helped several people set up stores with it, basically whatever customization people want, someone else has already made it and published it for free, so there has been a very low cost to get started with osCommerce for each store.
Still, I agree it can be painful and scary to work with. I miss automated test suite, like I'm using to building based on Perl's Test::WWW::Mechanize. It pains to me to hand apply a patch that doesn't come as a diff, but a series of instructions like "Around line 23, notice this code and add this line....".
In the short term, I support osCommerce for pragmatic reasons. For the longer term, I encourage developers to continue to build cleaner solutions from the ground up. For Perl, see Handel as a starting point.
I recommend the Orinico Gold cards
In the Pugs project, the coders and testers are generally different people, when the tests being written first.
I'm fairly ignorant about the kernel development process, so I ask: could automated testing play a greater role in the quality assurance of the project?
Not in this case. The newspaper changed their mind for other reasons. As it turned out, the file formats didn't slow us down much while the project was active.
To start, they used open records requests to get the details of people who recently voted, and details of those who recently died.
The goal was to find people who continued to vote after they died, which may sound funny, but is still happening.
The data the government data gave us was on magnetic reels. The data on the reels was stored in a fixed-width EBCDIC format. Talk about a dead format!
It turned out the local college still had a working magnetic reel reader, and was able to help me get the data out of EBCDIC into ASCII, but the project was cancelled anyway.
Until we upgraded the OS recently, we had 480 days uptime on our primary web server.
What I'm less clear about it is how one might implement some of the "value added" features that tt2site has, such automatically building a menu system for the site, including highlighting your current location in it.
I'm interested to learn more about XML+XSLT as a templating solution.
This solution worked well for me. If you have other suggestions for systems that work like the Dreamweaver templating system, I'm interested to hear them. But I don't count include files!
I would expect people to still use a visual editor, such as NVU for visual work.
tt2site, which is based on tt2ttree, is currently under-documented, but looks like it could shape up to be a fairly easy to use templating solution, requiring minimal use of the command line. (Until someone writes some GUI hooks to run it from Quanta).
I'm the author, and I'm a professional Perl programmer. I prefer Perl because I know Perl better.
I don't think those litle bike computers are big enough to be spies anyway.
To manually test websites, I run Linux on my desktop. This allows me to test Windows/IE via WINE, as well as Mozilla and Konqueror (which should render like Safari).
It doesn't catch every issue, but it works well for me.
So why not just have your unix shell account on your desktop machine? If you are not already using Mac or Linux, it's easy to create a dual-boot with the Mandrake install CDs, or have a portable solution with a Knoppix CD and a USB stick.
Have you considered contacting that single site about having them updating their design? Might be easier.
snownews is a great console RSS reader.
vim has as "outline" mode, which looks like it could make it even more useful, but I haven't try migrated to it.
I used to think that this solution was too low-tech to be especially useful. However, I found all the more formal solutions I tried felt too clumsy. Because they were slower to use, I didn't use them.
As a programmer, I always have the text editor open and can search and organize the text document easily.
Also, feel free to let Monsanto know what you think.
Maybe you should sneak out to the Take Back Your Time conference?
Here's an idea to get rid of the iPod: Take some voice lessons, then leave your favorite songs in your phone as voice mail or voice memos.
I've recently been using w3m a lot more recently and highly recommend it. It supports a number of vi-like and emacs-like keystrokes if you are into that kind of thing. It also has a number of other noteworthy features:
- Although it's console based, it can display images. This is a really neat trick. It's actually using X11 to overlay images on the console. It even works when w3m is in a remote terminal, as long as X11 is forwarded back.
- It supports tabbed browsing.
- SSL support
- It supports tables and frames, so it generally renders pages decently.
- It has "incremental search", like Mozilla's type-ahead-find.
- Generally excellent keyboard navigation
- It's easy to switch to an external graphical browser if you need one. I use w3m on my Mac, and just press "M" to have it open the current page in Safari.
- It allows you to use your editor-of-choice to edit textareas. I imagine you could use a graphical editor with it
I use it frequently as a general purpose browser now, switching to a browser that supports graphics and javascript if I need to.
w3m seems to be a generation ahead of 'lynx'. It's quite impressive.
My favorite typing program has been Ten Thumbs Typing Tutor. It seems really effective, and was also somewhat 'fun'. It's available for Mac, Linux and that other OS.