Website Gurus

[CraigSca]

While my college background is computer science, for better or worse, I've never had a job as a programmer. I've programmed single-person applications before, but I've never learned the whole Web server or web-based programming thing. So, with that in mind (e.g. I know how to program, just haven't a clue how to do so in the web environment) I ask you this:

Let's say I have a set of text files. I'd like to set up a parser that takes the data from the files and displays it on the web. Really, what I'm trying to do is take a baseball game's output (Diamond Mind Baseball) and making it look like this: www.flyingpicklebaseball.com (http://www.flyingpicklebaseball.com) - of particular interest is the ability to "watch" the days games as they are played (I noticed this happens during the evening hours EST)

It really can't be hard - I just have no idea how to write a parser that runs on a web server. What language would I use? What would I have to do as set-up on my host? How can I compile a program to run on my host and parse a file every 30 seconds to update the site? Do you REALLY need to know pure HTML to make a site like this, or can you use a 3rd-party tool to make the site dynamic like this?

Thanks in advance!

[Antmeister]

...It really can't be hard - I just have no idea how to write a parser that runs on a web server. What language would I use? What would I have to do as set-up on my host? How can I compile a program to run on my host and parse a file every 30 seconds to update the site? Do you REALLY need to know pure HTML to make a site like this, or can you use a 3rd-party tool to make the site dynamic like this?

Thanks in advance!

Well if you want to parse the data from the text file, you can use either PHP or PERL. Your host should have at least one of the two languages. And yes you would have to know some HTML because that is a presentation language for the browser.

Now as far as using a 3rd party tool, you could use this open source program to do a lot of the PHP coding. However, I don't know if this goes beyond your needs:
http://umbraco.org/