Cyber Weekly Consulting

Web.Help: Automating the Operation
From the October 1998 issue of the Digital Edge

By Brian Chin
Webmaster, Seattle Post-Intelligencer
1997 NAA Minority New Media Fellow.

Note: Because this article is only available behind a password-protected wall of the Digital Edge site, we have excerpted the portion quoting Eric Magill of Cyber Weekly Consulting (Shareware for the Server) for this page. If you have access to the protected areas of the Digital Edge site, you may go there to see the complete article.

Shareware for the Server

Newspapers don't necessarily need commercial software to build elaborate Web sites, claims Eric Magill, Webmaster of Beach-Net!, a travel guide for the DelMarVa (Delaware, Maryland, Virginia) coastal region, and a principal at Cyber Weekly Consulting.

Magill set up interactive features at Beach-Net! using shareware and freeware CGI scripts, generally written in Perl for Unix servers, which are readily available online at sites such as the CGI Resource Index. "I highly recommend it to anyone trying to enhance a Web site on a limited budget," Magill advises.

For shareware fees of about $200, he says he obtained scripts to provide an online message board, a search engine, a guest book, chats, a postcard utility and calendars. That price tag includes a $125 classified advertising system that automates the entire process of posting, maintaining and aging out ads, and ending email notifications to the submitter and the Webmaster.

"Licensing or buying custom software or CGIs is out of the question for us," he explains. "It's not that any one is too expensive - we just couldn't afford to buy these solutions or hire a programmer for every application we thought of."

Magill cautions that because the creators of shareware and freeware CGIs normally offer little in the way of technical support, there can be hidden costs in setting them up and keeping them running. He notes that publications that use them "must have someone on staff who knows Perl, or a cooperative ISP [with someone on staff] who knows Perl and will install the scripts at a minimal cost."

He says he experienced only a few problems with free scripts installed at Beach-Net! Some of the glitches included a postcard CGI that sent out incorrect announcements by email, and a guestbook that originally couldn't cope with input from simultaneous users. Even so, he feels the programs have proven to be valuable marketing tools that justified the "hidden costs."

"Web.Help: Automating the Operation", is Copyright The Digital Edge, 1998, a Web-based publication of the Newspaper Association of America, http://www.digitaledge.org.