Home Page - [Bob Novell's Nook on the Web]

Do you want to dynamically insert things into your web pages (such as a navigation list like the one on the left of my pages) so that you can keep one copy and don't have to edit everyone of your pages when you add a page, remove a page, or change a file name BUT your ISP or hosting company (wherever you have your site) won't let you use SSI (Server Side Includes)?

When I had my sites on the AT&T servers, the "old" AT&T provided what they called PWP - Personal Web Pages. When they got into the ISP business in the early 1990's, they offered 10MB of space for each of your email addresses (up to six) where you could put a web site. That was great but they disabled SSI support and no amount of explaining that SSI was no a security threat - or plain old begging - would get them to enable SSI.

So, I wrote JavaScripter to get around the problem, at least to some degree.

JavaScripter will take whatever you provide as input, escape certain characters, everything in unescapes and document.writelins. You could then put the output in a .js file, include the file in your page wherever you want the material inserted and then you had a way to keep on copy of something and be able to update it in one place and have it show on all your pages.

Go to the JavaScripter Help page for more information.

By the way - the "new" AT&T is the old SBC. When SBC bought AT&T they kept AT&T's name - it had a better reputation than theirs. But they began acting like SBC from the start. They forced everyone off the AT&T WorldNet WebMail - an excellent system - and on to SBC/Yahoo which sucks. Feature wise, it was about 1,000 giant steps backwards. Then they dropped PWP - they gave us about 5 weeks notice to find a hosting company, move our sites, test them, and get the word out as to the new location. If your email address was, as an example, myemail@att.net, your web site's URL was either myemail.home.att.net or home.att.net/!myemail.

So, when you move off the AT&T servers, you had to tell everyone what domain name you registered.

To make a rather long and detailed story short - I lost my sites before I could get popup message on the pages so that people could be given the new URLs. One site, which is now at www.sugarcatsimon.com (there's a link in the Nav list on the left) was a very busy site and then one day it vanished. I got the word out, via email, to as many people as I could but the site has never recovered the amount of traffic it had.

I'm not concerned with the amount traffic, per say, but I am concerned that the site was no longer available from the many other sites that linked to it so that people who have just learned that their cat is diabetic could get to it and get some help.

Well, so much for the "new" AT&T - which is the old SBC - well, maybe not so much, quite yet. I'm in St. Louis, Missouri, USA. Southwestern Bell Telephone Company started in St. Louis many eons ago. They had a slogan "We May Be The Only Telephone Company In Town But We Try Not To Act Like It."

It really was "We ARE The ONLY Telephone Company In Town And We Make Sure You Never Forget It!"

So, when they had the chance to switch their name to AT&T they jumped at it.

Just remember, that the "new" AT&T is the old SBC!