I am fairly new to the world of webmastering, but am working on a site right now. The content is about complete, so now I want to focus on more technical aspects of the site. I have looked at Hotscripts for some CGI scripts and downloaded a forms processor, auto responder, and mailing list manager (all pending installation.) This made me curious as to how other webmasters are using CGI to automate functions on their sites. How much is too much? Just a couple questions I wanted to open up for discussion. Any feedback would be great.
Just look at the Hotscripts all the scripts that are there pretty much in heavy use by many webmasters.
There is never too much IMO. Automate your website as much as possible. That way you will have less work and save time. Only think first, if you are going to write a certain script yourself, "Is it worth it?". Sometimes I catch myself writing a complicated script that will save me 10 min/month. But I am just a Perl and automation addict :)
Imho in that case, automate as much as possible as long as you keep full control.. meaning you can tweak the code to produce the exact html that you want.
My company makes al websites database driven and fully automated because it's by far the most efficient thing to do now, but only after a long time of changing our CMS ("content management system") systems to do exactly what we want.
Automating has advantages in terms of site maintenance of course, but also in efficiency creating new pages and sections. It may be our choice of CMS but I find it does require ever more (programming)skills to produce a website this way. I think it's great fun but not everyone would enjoy having to learn more programming skills. Once you have - for example - figured out how to derive an alt tag based on your title or heading tag you save a lot of time going through every page on your domains to (re)write the alt tags ...
Possibilites are endless once you have your websites broken up into elements in a database and use CGI to fiddle with the data before 'dumping' it all as a complete website in static html.
>Sometimes I catch myself writing a complicated script that will save me 10 min/month
hehe.. yep.. that happens to me too :) but usually I do learn a thing or two in the process that can be used again later.
There is never too much IMO. Automate your website as much as possible.
I can't agree enough. Especially if your site is for ecommerce, the less you or any human needs to do the better.
-Pete
