Order of the Bath

I have finally got my mailform up and running in the way I would like it. It is surprising how time consuming it is to debug online services like this.

I am not unfamiliar with programming (having done it for near 40 years now) and scripting languages are quite familiar, but there are always subtle differences in new ones to make us yearn for some sort of language standardisation. Neither is it my first sight of PHP as I had to learn quickly to customise this blog. But then it was mainly a matter of copying preformed chunks of code from one place to another.

A lot of the formmail script I have re-written from scratch. The main reasons I wanted to do it are security (the original was rather prone to be abused by DOS [denial of service] fiends and spam merchants) and to make it easier to customise the user visuals.

The other thing which takes a long time is the documentation—a much abused and underrated skill—come back technical writers, you are sorely missed.

The script is now working for my own mail form but some of the features that I don’t use still need testing. It is available to look at, if you are interested, from my mailform page [discontinued]. (there is a zip download at the bottom) No warranty is given or implied but please feed back your experiences.

Many thanks to Joe Lumbroso, the author of Jack’s formmail.php script, and Matt Wright for the CGI script which in turn inspired that one.

This entry was posted on 16 Oct 2005 at 19:36 by Rick and is filed under Technical. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.