Yet another Task - Sat, 30 Aug 2008

Earlier this week, I finished and put up two of the last three webpages for this new site. Those were the Feedback and Buy Now pages. All that was left now was the Download page. That was going to be the trickiest because it involves a few web scripts and programs to allow calculating and emailing the trial key.

But what I discovered while I was trying to implement a check for valid email addresses was that IXWebhosting does not allow programs to be executed on their Windows servers. This means the PHP “exec” statement will not work, and compiled CGI programs (which I built using Delphi) in the cgi-bin directory will not be executed.

I was not pleased to find this out, especially when I was so near to having this all finished. So the key generation could no longer be done with my pre-compiled program that used the same code that Behold uses. I liked doing that because it guaranteed that the keys would always be generated the same way.

Other than finding a new host, which I’m not going to do right now, I’m going to have to rewrite all that code in PHP and very thoroughly check all of it to ensure it works exactly as it does in Behold. It’s unfortunate that I have to go through this work, but looking on the bright side, I can see some potential advantages of having it in PHP rather than in an executable, and I’m hoping I can have it finished within a week.

My mailing list, which was a ASP and Microsoft Access based tool on lkessler.com did manage to copy over and work right away on IXWebhosting. That is probably the only part of this web move that has. But it is the last remant of ASP and Access that I am using, and it may prove advantageous to convert that over to PHP and mySQL as well. Then everything will be integrated and accessible from the PHP scripts which may be better in the long term. Not only that, but I will no longer be tied to needing a Windows Hosting Service if I decide or need to change again.

So just a little more pain, for potential long-term gain.