On Thu, 18 Nov 1999, Nelson Zink wrote:
(snip)
> I still haven't quite figured out the pathname business.
> I actually use http://www.navaching.com/"myusername"-bin/echo.mt
> --rather than cgi-bin. I don't know if this is specific to my ISP or not.
Guess this is a good point to put in a plug for the ISP currently
hosting our WWW/FTP site (and yes, we do have several others and
switch around a lot) and to give some general advice as to what to
look for when chosing an ISP. The one Nelson is using seems pretty
good. At least they took the time to contact us when he asked them
about MetaCard. But the above path problem indicates there is
something he may not have gotten with his account, and that's a
dedicated IP address. Without one of those, you're going to be
constantly running into path limitations as shown above. And like
always having to have "/pub/something" be the first-level directory in
your FTP area. Neither of these are a problem if you've got a
dedicated IP address. Most ISPs don't offer this feature. But it
isn't any more expensive to go with one that does, like the one we
recently switched our WWW site to, "jumpline.com".
Secondly, even if you don't know UNIX (or know it just enough to hate
it), try to get a shell account (aka Telnet access) on the server.
That way if the fancy browser interface the ISP provides falls down at
some critical point, you at least have the option of going in there
the brute-force way and fixing the problem instead of being completely
helpless (or worse, dependent on the ISP's tech-support department).
Having a shell account will also make CGI script debugging vastly
easier if you don't have a UNIX system locally to test on, though the
value of the latter can't be underestimated.
> Too many things to find out, so little time to do it.
And we're all constantly falling further behind because new stuff is
coming out faster than we're learning about the old stuff...
Regards,
Scott
> Nelson
>
********************************************************
Scott Raney [EMAIL PROTECTED] http://www.metacard.com
MetaCard: You know, there's an easier way to do that...
