[thelist] PWS rant

[Rudy_Limeback at maritimelife.ca]

working on some updates to my personal site (on my lunch hour, but don't 
tell my employer, 'cause i was using my company computer) when i hit 
another one of those wonderful technology brick walls that we love so much

i use server side includes extensively in my pages, so i wanted to install 
Personal Web Server in order to test my revised pages

it took a while to find PWS (the microsoft site isn't as bad as some 
people make it out to be, but it's bad enough)

once downloaded and installed, PWS worked pretty good -- i can enter 
either http://127.0.0.1/ or http://rudy-limeback/ and both internet 
explorer and netscape are served pages out of the wwwroot directory with 
no problem

but the #include's didn't work

i selected the Help menu in order to look up the documentation, but the 
first thing i had to do was install something called "Table of Contents" 
which came with the following warning:

      Caution: Microsoft Corporation asserts that this content is
      safe. You should only install/view this content if you trust
      Microsoft Corporation to make that assertion.

after i finished wiping up the soup i accidentally sprayed all over my 
screen when i read that gem, i carried bravely on and ended up with a 
cutesy browser window that had basically a tree structure like you see in 
a windows Help file except this was in the left frame of a web page, it 
was supposed to show you web pages of documentation in the right frame

okay, let's have a look at the #include documentation -- whups, page not 
found!

do i really want to re-install PWS?  i 'm *sure* i checked the box to 
install the documentation

ah, the hell with it

i have a secret weapon, called Search & Replace (by funduc software -- 
http://funduc.com/search_replace.htm)

i will go through and physically replace each #include line with the 
appropriate lines of included text *in every htm file*

and when i'm ready to ftp up to my server, i'll just run S&R again to 
reverse the effect

takes two minutes, whereas this PWS bullshit already took an hour and a 
half and got me nowhere


whew, i feel better


<tip type="evolt spotting">
Experience the history of the web!
http://www.dejavu.org/
- has a history section
- has an online emulator for lynx, mosaic, etc.
- mentions browsers.evolt.org as the place to get "almost all old 
browsers"
</tip>


rudy
r937.com