All right-thinking people have an opinion about Perl, king of the Unix text manglers. I happen to like it, because Perl makes the road from prototyping to finished product swift. I also happen to hate it, because it can make the road from finished product to bugfixed product very, very bumpy. Work and personal interest has led me to start playing with Python, which I might also write about someday.

A shameful confession: I've never actually used the techniques described in this article on a production site. Maybe I'll change that here on sirilyan dotcom. This article also produced the biggest headache of my life, trying to get code samples that would work perfectly with the 3.x and up Navigator generations to do anything at all, even just fail transparently, on IE3.

Of course, now we live in a world that's allegedly inhabited only by Internet Explorer (myself, I doubt it, and have the access logs to prove it), so all these problems have gone away, right? Wrong, wrong, wrong.

I love PHP. I've used it to build two sites so far, with more on the drawing board.

If you want to get the code samples, look at the special companion site for the article.

I'm a sick, sick person in some ways: I like writing code that does validity checks on all the input. I know most people don't like that, however, so I tried to at least make it look like fun. Includes examples of how to write Perl and JavaScript to make your hosting experience that much safer and less frustrating.