Stupid CGI Tricks

[Richard MacLemale]

OK, I do REALIZE that this is stupid, but since it involves MetaCard and the
mc Darwin engine and it works, I decided to post one of my MetaCard
cgi-driven pages here...

In elementary schools, they do these activities called "Mad Libs."  You fill
in a sheet of paper with a bunch of labeled lines, such as:

Noun: ______________________

Adjective: ________________________

And then they are inserted into a story.  The results are usually very
silly, and elementary children find them very, very funny.  Adults do not
usually find them funny, unless inappropriate language is used to fill in
the blanks.

Anyway, I did an example of this with Metacard's darwin engine running on a
stock OS 10.1.1 iMac running Apache.  The page is accomplished with two
elements - a web page named madlib.htm, and a text file named madlib.mt.

The link is:
http://mitchellonline.pasco.k12.fl.us/madlib.htm

While this is obviously a primitive example, it does show what can be done
with the mc Darwin engine.  This is really, really exciting stuff.  Using
these same concepts it should be pretty straightforward to build all kinds
of neat server-based services like calendars, planners, etc.

I will eventually get around to making a step by step web page for doing
this stuff, but I decided to post my silly example in the meantime for folks
to see.  Thanks to all on this list for being so extremely helpful.  There's
no other authoring environment like MetaCard, and there's no other mailing
list like this one!


:)
Richard MacLemale
Instructional Technology Specialist
James W. Mitchell High School