Documentation
POETRY BOT:  V1.0

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Preleminary Material for review

• Perl and Telnet Tutorials

System Requirements

• Perl 5
• Server Sides Includes
• That's about it

Preliminaries

• Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.

• If you need to review or learn the basics of CGI and Perl visit the tutorial

• Download the tarfile for this program and save it to your desktop. 

• Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM. 

• After you have unpacked the TAR archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

Configure the .cgi files

setting up the script

Basically its ready to rip.  You can certainly have a lot of fun changing the verbs and nouns around but other than that it pretty much is ready to go.  Just upload, chmod everything to 777 or 666 except pbot.pl chmod to 755.  Setup the index.shtml page wherever you want the poems to be (see my front page for an example) and you are ready to rock.

• index.shtml   Server sides includes page that calls pbot.pl (make sure it points to the FULL path)
• place.poe   Words that may describe places (physical, mental, whatever)
• nouns.poe   Take a guess
• adjs.poe   Good old adjective list
• verbs.poe   Verb list
• pbot.pl   The script - no configuration required

Uploading the files

• /cgi-bin/pbot/
  • pbot.pl
  • place.poe
  • nouns.poe
  • adjs.poe
  • verbs.poe

The real reason for this script

No I am not on drugs.  I just wanted to release this awesome script because I have another script that uses some of the subroutines that is a VERY useful money making script I have been hoarding for 3 years.   Don't worry, it will be out soon.  In the meantime have some fun for a change.