I maintain the Bay Cup website, www.olagrande.net/users/edew/baycup. I post results and standings from the Bay Cup events. At first, the results and standings were maintained by Eric Schlaepfer. He went off to college and I was left to maintain the site. Maintaining the site means updating the results and re-computing the standings.

Last year, I wrote a script to compute the standings based on the results. To put both the results and standings in html format, I just save in MS-Word as html files. I open the standings file in Excel and sav as html files as well. Very simple.

Well, I don't have access to either MS-Word or MS-Excel (since I used them at a previous employment, and current employment is a linux-only house, and I'm doing most of the website maintenance from home and we have Macs at home...). So I have to modify plain-text files into html files with tables and such. So, I spent this evening scripting out various perl scripts to do it. Take a look at it by clicking on the results (-> senior results) and standings (-> senior standings).

Perl is really a nice scripting language for modifying plain text into html text. Of course, it helps if you have the plain text in a certain format. It's not the fancy webpages that we see here and elsewhere, but it's plain dirty html files with all the usual tags and such, written in plain ascii.