Diary of a Network Geek

The trials and tribulations of a Certified Novell Engineer who's been stranded in Houston, Texas.

2/7/2003

CGI Programming

Filed under: Fun Work,PERL — Posted by the Network Geek during the Hour of the Hare which is terribly early in the morning or 6:22 am for you boring, normal people.
The moon is Waxing Crescent

It took a year, but I did it!

Did what, you might be wondering? I finally figured out a CGI script for Fantasist.net that I’ve been working on for almost a year.
See, I love words and languages, especially foreign words and languages. In fact, I love them so much that I’ve tried to create them on several occasions, just like J.R.R. Tolkien did. But, since I’m not a trained linguist like Tolkien, I’ve always cast about for help creating the words. I want them to sound authentic, but not be actual words from an actual language. I’d hate to put together words that I thought were quite alien and unique only to find out that I’d insulted a publisher in Istanbul or Delhi! So, I searched for help with that on the web. Boy, did I find help! One of the best places, though, was Chris Pound’s Name Generation page. Chris is a linguist and has made several PERL scripts that generate new words based on input from an existing language. Finally, I could get words that were phonetically similar to an existing language that were new and unique!
But, of course, I wasn’t satisfied with that. I had to go further. What about people who couldn’t figure out PERL? I mean, it’s taken me forever to tweak things and get a good handle on the basics. What about all those potential conlangers who just aren’t up to PERL? My 11-year-old daughter, for instance, has recently gotten into conlanging. How could I make this available for her, without trying to teach her PERL? The answer, of course, is the web. So, I modified Chris’ scripts and played with data until I understood it fairly well. Then, I tried to get it up on the web. I was a miserable failure.
Until last night, that is. I started with a very basic CGI tutorial and started building upward from there until I had a simple form that would give me simple, html-friendly output. From there, it was a simple matter of tweaking the original PERL script, and an html form, until I had a good combination. And, though, I have to work out formatting and style-sheets, here it is at Fantasist.net: WordGenerator.
Enjoy!


Powered by WordPress
Any links to sites selling any reviewed item, including but not limited to Amazon, may be affiliate links which will pay me some tiny bit of money if used to purchase the item, but this site does no paid reviews and all opinions are my own.