Thanks for the cgi source to Matt's Script Archive.
Daniel Anderson
Joi Lynne Chevalier
2/26/97
The server environment is easy to overlook as we
focus on the content and presentation of the pages we find on the web.
When I wanted to provide an easy way for readers to suggest relevant sites on the
web we went looking for a script. I found the addlinks script I wanted and
began to set it up on our server.
Since our systems administrator had moved on to a job that pays real money, I was left on my own to wander the dark side of the UNIX machine and to figure out how to make the script work. It soon became apparent that it wouldn't be as simple as putting the file into the proper (cgi-bin) directory on the server and pointing to it. The script needed to be configured specifically for the file and directory structure on our server. The location of language libraries directories and chronological markers had to be changed and the privilages of the scripts and some of the web files had to be modified.
With some help from readme files and a good deal of trial and error I was able to get the thing to work. Readers could now add links to the web pages that we put up, making the web sites that we built more constructive and communal.
Once I got the addlinks script to function, however, I realized a pedagogical problem. Since I had been telling my students that a web site with long lists of unannotated links was bad style, I was shooting myself in the foot by providing a mechanism that automatically created a long list of unexplained links. Anyone could now add to our pages, but I had assured that the material they added would be less than ideally presented in the web environment.
It became necessary to venture back into the server side of the web, back to the script. Working with another colleague, Tonya Browning, we figured out where to add another variable to the script and how to have the script recognize a new element that we would put in the addlink form: a comments field.
We modified the script and the entry form and soon had re(created) a server operation that not only allowed readers to add links to a page but prompted these readers to annotate the links that they were adding.
Opening the web, making it modifiable for those who weren't the authors of the original pages was a small but important step. The web is a primitive form of hypertext that doesn't normally allow much constructive interaction from readers, BUT the incredible audience potential of the web makes using it vital to a teacher of composition. Even this small step is helping us merge the possibilities of web audience with the democratizing potentials of hypertext.
If you'd like to add a link to this project, use the form (that I've been discussing) below: