With the demise of Thales I've decided to try and clean up my web site. There are several ways to get to it and unfortunately some of them depend on a web server at port 8080 redirecting requests. Luckily, I already have a server at 8080 -- a Pictorious Net Server (long unsupported after the company went under) which is mainly there to serve movie files. Big file downloads that are cancelled seem to choke NetPresenz so that it doesn't process any more requests.

In any case, after Thales went down I noticed a lot of requests on the Pictorious server. They're all going to Tartan's Alicia Silverstone site which now that I see that I remember I set it to "http://www.tgd-inc.com:8080 /tartan/alicia/". All of this redirection is starting to get confusing and it would be nice if Dave and I backed up each others' sites so that there would be some redundancy in cases like this. Sure, my scripts won't work on a Sun box, though that's a small problem since a properly configured Apache server does what I want without using CGIs. Dave's scripts on the other hand won't work on Jennifer since he's actually doing work with those scripts.

Redundancy and reliability have not been big concerns for Dave or I. For one, we run personal web sites. Well, we are expanding. Dave has some sort of Apple Internet Gaming Group (or whatever AIGG stands for) and I have Tartan's sites, and I know that Tartan's site gets about a thousand page requests a day. Dave has a big Sun box with tape backup -- it's just too bad that he's not here to do a restore since I have no idea how to do it. My websites are backed up on my personal machine, where I do the development. So the websites are mirrors of what's on my machine. And I also have a backup server (Alicia) which, although very old, can handle the load until I buy another computer should Jennifer explode.

What I want is one site with folders for each site. The root level is just some sort of index file for choosing one of the sites and processing for redirecting to hudsonleickfan.com. That requirement is a bit hard since the processing requires a page miss which triggers a missing.acgi program that can then examine the request and redirect if appropriate. Actually, on an Apache server it's not a problem. But on Jennifer it is since I have the base www.tgd-inc.com:8080 mapped to my home page which is at /kcw.

Problem here is that Pictorious doesn't handle CGIs well, so the server returns an error since there is no index.html to server. Possible solutions are to add an index.html but that will conflict with NetPresenz's missing.acgi invocation since there won't be a page miss at the root. Another possiblity is to have a different index page such as default.html and tell Pictorious to use default.html as the default index page. But that means that I have to have a duplicate default.html in every directory. Last solution is to set up realms in Pictorious, which allows you to have different default index pages for different realms. But I couldn't get that to work, possibly because it's broken (Pictorious doesn't seem to recognize the request's web site which is why a redirection CGI doesn't work either).

I settled on the "put a default.html in every directory". Luckily, Pictorious does handle aliases so the default.html can be aliases of index.html so that I only have to update one file. Bad is that backup programs will break that. They'll copy the alias which points to the original file on Angela -- Mac aliases point to specific files, not locations as with Unix symbolic links. Ok, I could write an Applescript that will crawl through the web site and create the alias files.

But I don't want to do a backup and then run a separate script each time. So the next idea is an AppleScript that runs the backup program and then runs the alias maker. My backup program is NetFinder and I can't run the sync mirror command from AppleScript. I guess they forgot it. Aargh! Ok, now we come to the last option: write an AppleScript backup program. And that's what I will spend the next few days or weeks doing; which at least gives me something to write about.