Electric Postcard Office Operating Manual

The Postcard Rack

Main page: the card rack

The main page of the Postcard Rack (cardrack.html) contains a list of the available picture categories. Each entry in the list is a category and is in this form:

 <a href="/script directory/rack-reading script?image database file|category title">
category name</a>

script directory is the (server redirected) directory where the Postcard scripts are stored.
the rack-reading scriptis the script that handles reading and parsing the database files. In the distribution it is called readRack.perl
image database file is the file containing the list of images that are found in the category.
category title is the heading that appears on the page of images that is generated when you click on this entry.

readRack.perl is a CGI script and image database file/category title are its arguments, supplied as a query string. Remember that these arguments must be URL encoded: thus plus signs are used instead of spaces, etc.

Here is an example. Rheingold.list is the image database file and Digital+Neurostimuli is the category title:

<a href="/PO-bin/readRack.perl?Rheingold.list|Digital+Neurostimuli">
Howard Rheingold</a>

which produces: Howard Rheingold

Here is a more complex example. In addition to the regular encoding, if you want to include angle brackets (if, for example, you want to title to be an link), using the numeric encoding %3C and %3E for the brackets < and >. In this example, the header of the resulting page contains a link.

<a href =
"/PO-bin/readRack.perl?ArtN3.list|%3Ca+href=http://www.artn.nwu.edu/%3E(Art)^n%3C/a%3E+Gallery+3">
(Art)^n Gallery 3</a>

which produces: (Art)^n Gallery 3. Note that, on the resulting page, (Art)^n is a link. In this example:

The script directory is PO-bin
readRack.perl is the rack-reading script that handles reading and parsing the database files.
The image database file is ArtN3.list
The category title is %3Ca+href=http://www.artn.nwu.edu/%3E(Art)^n%3C/a%3E+Gallery+3

image database file

For each category, there is a database file. This file has an entry for every postcard in the database. 2-5 is a good number of postcards to have in category. With more, it takes too long for the page of selections to load.

Fields in each entry are separated with vertical bars: | An entry is in this form:

code | image-path | title | artist

code: will be used in future implementations. For now, use 12.
image-path: the (server-redirected) image path of the postcard picture.
title and artist: the information that appears under the postcard picture. They can be links. If including a url, it should be written without quotation marks.

Here is the first line from the file that produced this page:

12|Postcards/PostCardPix/Rheingold/familiar.gif|Familiar|<a href = http://www.well.com/www/hlr/> Howard Rheingold</a>

code is 12
image-path is Postcards/PostCardPix/Rheingold/familiar.gif
title is Familiar
artist is <a href = http://www.well.com/www/hlr/> Howard Rheingold</a>

Return to Electric Postcard Operations: Introduction

Last modified: Sun Apr 7 01:22:30 1996