 | About BITE |
This site was generated using BITE- a set of Perl functions.
BITE works
best for mostly-text
web sites, like those we see on PDAs.
BITE is simple enough to learn.
The souce code is very small (< 300 lines of Perl) and each
page on this site is a worked example of using BITE. So the best
way to learn BITE is to look at some page (say,
X.html), then look at the Perl source code
that made it (usually, src/X.pl).
|
| Some details |
BITE is about the fifth time I've tried
to code up my web site cliches in Perl and this time, maybe,
it all seems simple enough to be actually
useful by someone else.
BITE is
© 2003, under the GNU public license version 2
The current version is 0.1 |
| Mailing list |
The BITE user group mailing list is
http:// groups.yahoo.com/ group/ bitesized/.
Please use that list
to report bugs, suggest enhancements,
and offer tips about BITE.
To email this group, use
bitesized@yahoogroups.com
Hint: if you are going to use this mailing list,
if may be best
to first join Yahoo. |
| Tips |
There is (currently) no tutorial for BITE.
Here are some random tips.
To build a new page, copy base/ _.pl to some new file
name, and edit that.
Don't try to understand BITE, just copy it. Browse
around till you find some page your like, say pretty.html.
Then, look how it is built in src/ pretty.pl (this can usually
be accsses via the src link at the bottom of the page). Try it out yourself!
|
| BITEmarks |
BITE's own little mark-up language.
|
| Requires |
The Unix shell scripting tricks used in the two
high-level drivers bite and
bites need
a
a bash shell (e.g. from cygwin) or in any Unix installation).
But everything else is standard Perl.
So, there's two alternative preliminary
steps.
EITHER Get a shell installed (e.g. from
cygwin
OR
Kludge up something on your local machine to replace
bite and
bites
|
| Download |
Right click on the
BITE zip file (bite.zip), and save it to a fresh directory.
|
| Installation |
Unzip all the files in bite.zip to a fresh directory
called (e.g.) SITE.
This gives you a copy of everything
I have on this site- that's a lot of stuff you just
don't want. So cd to your SITE and
run bite -0 to give you
a minumum set of pages (warning: if you don't want
to accidently overwrite files, this call should only
ever be called ONCE when you FIRST set up this site
and NEVER after you write your own files).
Edit base/ _config.pl and change
the pathnames in the first few lines.
Change directory to SITE and run
bash bite.
If your lucky, your see something
like this
demoout.txt
If that worked, you should now have a bunch
of site/ *.html files.
|
| Going to Unix |
Folks porting BITE from Cygwin to UNIX report two problems.
Firstly: strange newline characters in BITE. This is the standard
dos2unix problem. Hence, BITE now contains bite.sh generated
via
cat bite | perl base/dos2unix.pl > bite.sh
So if you get the newline problem, use bite.sh instead
of bite.
Another problem I've seen is "Strict.pm is
not found". If you get that one, edit base/_bite.pl
and remove the line require Strict;.
|
| Add-ons |
Standard BITE comes with a whole mess of stuff you may not want.
Check out the following and see what to miss.
One of the functions in bite
includes a batch upload from a to a ftp site
using ncftpput.
If you
can't (or don't want to) use this, then never invoke
bite -upload.
The file src/links.pl slurps in bookmarks from Internet Explorer
and generates a links page.
If you want this feature, edit the first few lines of
src/links.pl to add in the right path names. If not,
move src/links.pl out of src.
The files src/papers.pl and
src/Draftpub.pl slurp in a bibtex file to generate my
bibliography pages.
If you do want this feature, edit base/ _b2hconfig.pl.
If not, move these files out of src.
|
| Starting |
To get started with BITE, try the following (these instructions
assume you have unzipped BITE into some directory SITE).
Copy SITE/ base/ _.pl to (e.g.)
SITE/src/ myfirstbite.pl.
Make some tiny change.
cd to SITE
Run
bash bite.
Look for your change in the result
( SITE/ myfirstbite.html).
|
| Files |
SITE:
The directory where you store your site.
SITE/base:
Stores the source code.
SITE/src/*.pl:
An HTML file SITE/x.html is generated
by running the Perl script:
perl -w SITE/src/x.pl.
SITE/bites:
Runs all the SITE/src/*.pl.
SITE/bite:
Runs all the SITE/src/*.pl, but only if
they are newer than their associated SITE/*.html
files.
SITE/base/_config.pl:
Contains magic variables. Edit to your taste.
SITE/base/_bite.pl:
Contains the source code for the BITE system.
You shouldn't need to edit this.
SITE/bite.pl:
Generates the file SITE/ bite.html (i.e.
this file).
bite.zip:
A zip file, updated by
bite and
bites, that stores this whole site (for
easy downloading- see Installation).
|
| bites |
To update all the html files, run bash bites
in the main directory of your SITE.
This is good for resetting the whole system
after (e.g.) changing base/ _config.pl
Note that bash bites calls bash bite -all.
|
| bite |
To update just the src/*.pl you have recently
editted, run bash bite.
This is useful
for quick updates.
|
| Bugs |
The PERL code that generates files src/papers.pl and
src/Draftpub.pl from my bibtex files is awful stuff.
It works, but gee I'd like to clean it up.
|
| Author |
me |