Mathieu Tozer's Dev Blog

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You can't do development without using the terminal.

I've come to face the wall of static HTML web pages with my words project. 

I'm proud of the progress I've made, but feel that a shift of approach will be needed to end up with the goal that I want.

A single search found a perl module for make web applicatons that use AJAX, and DHTML. 

It's going to be right up my alley.

I also feel more comfortable about using perl now. Who says that Web Applications have to be written on rails, and scripted in ruby?

I'm reading up on it now.

It's all terribly exciting
I've decided to add tagging to words.
I've got a nice table for putting data into, my goal now is to fill that table with meaningful data that can help the user learn vocabulary.
I've linked together a few pages and it seems to work nicely.

Think about what functionality you will need to make the app at least a little bit usable!? This is something I heard this morning as I walked to the gym listening to the Cocoa radio podcast. It follows the 37 signals philosophy. In fact the guy being interviewed is the author of the text editing software I am using develop Words. It's all interconnected really!

I also feel as though in web words, there isn't going to be a single file called 'words'. "Words" will be a collection of small scripts which work together in a neat system.

My next actions to make the app more useful is to parse the dictionary returned definitions so they aren't so large.

I also need to think about other dictionaries, and languages.

ARGHGH! 

TODAYS LESSON learnt is to try scripts on the command line of the server as well, it will give you more helpful errors that will ever get in the browser (and duly so - we have to remember anyone in the world can potentially see those those error messages).

Turns out I had simply left an old use Net::dict file from another script I had pasted the code from, and this module isn't installed on the Monash server.

So I was gettin' all kinds of nasty errors. Should work now.

Ah it works a treat. 

Actually that's what todays itty bitty script is all about - cutting down on "treat's". It's just a log for what I'm eating throughout the day. 

I love being able to think of a little tool one afternoon after eating a big sausage roll, and then after an hour having a script implementing that idea. Small Idea, yes, but it's satisfying nonetheless. Getting it to work on the Monash Server was harder (as mentioned above!)

Until late last night I hacked away at my perl script, sitting remotely on the server out at Monash. I fell asleep marveling at how easy it was to run programs from anywhere... the possibiloties.

Well, if you call easy learning about apache, the chmod file permissions, ftp, a scripting language and heaps more all at once while trying not to loose vision of your dream and goal!

Anyway, this morning I set up a virtual host on my local machine. I'm loosing the glam of working remotely with a big, powerful machine at my University, but it means that the development environment it a lot quicker.