Greenguy's Board - View Single Post

ecchi · 2010-03-28, 05:43 AM

None. Years ago I learnt Perl, so now if I need software for any job on my websites I simply write it myself.

I have said often enough to be boring on the subject that any serious webmaster who does not know Perl (or a similar language) should take the time to learn it. Not only does it mean I can have any program I want on my website, and have it configured to do EXACTLY what I want in EXACTLY the way I want it to do the job, it also saves me a lot of time.

For example, if you do free sites you will have hundreds of free sites, if you do gallery submission you will have thousands of galleries. Now imagine one of your main sponsors closes down, or changes it's link code, or is proved to be a major shaver. You either change all your links or loose a hell of a lot of money. Loosing money sucks, but changing all those links takes hours or days, depending on how many sites/galleries you have. It would take me about 10 minutes to write a script that searched my computer for links to that sponsor and changed them for an appropriate link to a different sponsor (unless it was someone I used in a hell of a lot of micro niches, so it had a lot of different changes to make depending on which link the niche was in, that could take up to half an hour to write, but that is still a fraction of the time it would take to do it by hand). I'd let the script run while I did something else, then upload the new files. Or I could save the time spent FTPing as well by writing the program to run on my server, then I'd just have to upload the script, and let it work there.

I have never measured the time saved by Perl, but I would guess that it only took a few months to "pay back" the time I spent learning it, and in the years since has saved me enough time for several long holidays!

2010-03-28, 05:43 AM	#2
ecchi Banned Join Date: Oct 2003 Location: About to be evicted!!!! Posts: 4,082	None. Years ago I learnt Perl, so now if I need software for any job on my websites I simply write it myself. I have said often enough to be boring on the subject that any serious webmaster who does not know Perl (or a similar language) should take the time to learn it. Not only does it mean I can have any program I want on my website, and have it configured to do EXACTLY what I want in EXACTLY the way I want it to do the job, it also saves me a lot of time. For example, if you do free sites you will have hundreds of free sites, if you do gallery submission you will have thousands of galleries. Now imagine one of your main sponsors closes down, or changes it's link code, or is proved to be a major shaver. You either change all your links or loose a hell of a lot of money. Loosing money sucks, but changing all those links takes hours or days, depending on how many sites/galleries you have. It would take me about 10 minutes to write a script that searched my computer for links to that sponsor and changed them for an appropriate link to a different sponsor (unless it was someone I used in a hell of a lot of micro niches, so it had a lot of different changes to make depending on which link the niche was in, that could take up to half an hour to write, but that is still a fraction of the time it would take to do it by hand). I'd let the script run while I did something else, then upload the new files. Or I could save the time spent FTPing as well by writing the program to run on my server, then I'd just have to upload the script, and let it work there. I have never measured the time saved by Perl, but I would guess that it only took a few months to "pay back" the time I spent learning it, and in the years since has saved me enough time for several long holidays!