Automatic updates for your "What's New" list
By Randal L. Schwartz
Well, I knew it. In my last column, I wrote about fellow Web Techniques columnist Lincoln Stein's new CGI.pm, version 2.20a, which added a nifty feature for writing HTML within a CGI script with minimal effort. I said:
However, as it was an alpha release, the version you end up using will almost certainly be different, and there may be slight interface changes.
Well, sure enough, there's a new version and it has changed. The keyword standard became :standard, less than 48 hours after I put the column to bed. If you had trouble making it work, go back and fix it now, especially if you are using the current revision (2.21) or later.
Unlike many of my previous columns, this month, I'm looking at a problem that doesn't involve HTTP at all. Nevertheless, it's a common problem facing Web-site administrators: How do you keep visitors coming back once they've been to your site? One way is to keep changing the content, but this raises a new question: How do you inform visitors that things do change, and what those changes are?
The simplest, mechanical way is to create a "what's new" list by examining the timestamps on your HTML files, and I've written a simple script to do just that. By the way, this month's column idea comes from fellow Perl hacker Joseph Hall, joseph@5sigma.com.
Stepping Through
