I archived all my old Peanut Press books using those instructions. Thanks Gris!

This is a long shot.

I work with a database written in some program that helps list our classes on the web. I have some wacky Django interface to it, because IT was sick of writing in code every time I had to update the web. There is a fundamental error way it is written, there is a table called "Courses" which contains the course descriptions and all the non-changing info about the class that connects to different tables-- books, dates, rooms etc. But the way it is built every time you add a new instance, you have to re-creat the course for the semester, and type in the course desrcription and everything else again. They you have to add the teacher (which sort or makes sense, the books, etc. Which is annoying because there is no easy way to do it.

Then, there is some sort of other "web programming" language on our page that makes it look like this:

[link]

What happens is that when I add an instance, I loose the books and have to add them back again. But which instance I need to tie them to seems random. On this page, the books were showing and I his Summer 2012 and Spring 2012-- then I went to another page, came back to this one, and the books were gone. So then I added the books to Fall 2012- and they did not show. So then I added them to Spring 2012, and now they show. But on other pages, I might have to add them to different semesters- there is no logic.

It is annoying to add the books to all semesters showing because I have to retype them every time, there is no "copy"

Oh, and I think the problem is there is literally no "one to many" relations, so that everything on the page, even the things that appear once (like course description) are in the database as many times as there have been instances of classes, and I have no idea how the page chooses which one is showing. It seems random, because sometimes I have typos in one, so I can tell what is showing up.

It sound like there are problems both in the database and in the cgi that takes the information from the database. Unfortunately, I can recognize that without being able to fix it. It sounds like you should have an actual content management system, but I have dealt with IT departments before that didn't want anyone touching their precious code.

I am thinking it would actually take less time to have a static web page for each course. We don't use the database for data ( in fact I delete old things so they do not randomly appear). They can't justify building something because my time doing the work around costs less that the web programmer writing something easier. This is the same reason we still can't take credit cards online and the students need to call me or mail a check

They can't justify building something because my time doing the work around costs less that the web programmer writing something easier.

But they'd only have to do it once and it would save your time year after year. It sounds more like lazy and/or incompetent.

Sophia, I feel your Pain. I was at a uni for 10 years and had to deal with stupid crap like that all of the tIme. I actually ended up bulidIng my own pages using Contribute.

I despise regular expressions with a passion.

I bow to their power, but they cause me tears. I learn Unix standard regex every time from scratch. And it hurts every time. I'm looking to, if not learn it forever this time, find a good tutorial that encourages me to remember, rather than get me to the regex I need to solve my problem this time and ignore anything else.

So if you were going to show someone who's giving up and giving in the best I-can-actually-already-code introduction to regex, what link would that be?

Hah, I cannot help, because I totally always just look up the one regex I need at the moment.

I feel bad. I worked out three different regexes, when technically there is one that will do it, and...I'm gonna forget that shit. But I recorded it, so at least that's not last.