make_dweeblist

Usage

make_dweeblist

Description

This script generates a "nice" index of users' home pages. I run it daily out of crontab on the web server. It runs as "me,", i.e., no special privileges, and the web page is generated in my web directory. The generated HTML page is here.

Notable features:

• The normal place for a user's web directory is ~user/public_html/; if that directory exists and is visible to this (unprivileged) script, the user is considered to "have" a web page. (Random sampling indicates that many are class assignments.)
• Some users don't want to have an entry in the index. There's a list of those good folks near the top of the script. (Actual user names don't appear in the version linked below.) The script checks to make sure these accounts still exist; when the account goes away, the name can be removed from the list.
• The script assumes the presence of server-side includes to include a small "style" file and to timestamp the script.
• Theres nothing particularly brilliant here, but the chores of alphabetizing and indexing the names, arranging them into a three-column table (alphabetized in each column, like a real index would do it, please note!) were interesting. Lots of Fortran-style math with row and column calculations. Lots of opportunities for off-by-one and other boundary errors. I think it's right, though.

Nothing derogatory is implied by the word "dweeb" in the script's name, or the generated HTML filename.

Source

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Last modified: June 18 2003 13:49 EDT