INLS 183 - Newby
November 19, 2001


Parody On-The-Fly: YesIWill
---------------------------

Overview: YesIWill is a Perl program that runs via CGI
to automatically make a parody of a Web site you choose.
The parody is based on simple substitution of words
based on a substitution list.

I saw coverage of this program in Slashdot, which talked
about efforts by sites that were parodied trying to
shut down the parody sites.

A mirror of the software is at http://yesiwill.plagiarist.org/

The Slashdot discussion is at 
http://slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=01/11/18/1632221&mode=thread



Steps:

1. I chose to install under a directory that will be
visible via the Web page (you might choose somewhere
different):  /home/ftp/pub/November19/parody

I needed to "mkdir parody"

This will map to http://blue.ils.unc.edu/November19


2. Download the code via http://yesiwill.plagiarist.org

I used  "wget http://yesiwill.plagiarist.org/downloads/yesiwill-1.0.tar.gz"


3. unzip and de-tar:

	"cat yesiwill-1.0.tar.gz | gunzip | tar x"

This does NOT create its own new directory.


4. View "readme.txt" and run ./configure

Initially, I wanted to make a parody of the ILS site,
http://ils.unc.edu.  However, this didn't work - evidently,
having the parody site be in the same domain as the site
being parodied is problematic for some of the pattern
matching in the Perl script.

I ended up changing the configuration file by hand (below).

For the ./configure:
	- I needed to specify my cgi-bin location
(../../October15/httpd/cgi-bin)
	- I needed to choose a location for the parody URL
(./November19/ils)

Everything else was fairly clear and common (e.g., the
location of Perl).


5. The ./configure made a few directories and copied things
over.  I didn't need to do a "make" or "make install".

Because the httpd's cgi-bin is owned by me, I didn't need
to be root for any part of this installation.


6. The URL to access the parody is:

	http://blue.ils.unc.edu/November19/parody/ils/

(as specified in the ./configure script)

This did not work quite right originally, when I tried
to parody the SILS site at http://ils.unc.edu.  I was
getting URLs in the parody output such as http://www.blue.ils.unc.edu
(which doesn't exist).

Eventually, I tried another few sites, and had success.
My solution was to change the iwill.conf (in cgi-bin) to
parody www.gutenberg.net instead.  (This is Project Gutenberg,
a project I'm affiliated with)


7. I got output, but it wasn't doing any parody substitutions.
I eventually saw that $basename in iwill.conf wasn't quite
right.  After fixing this, things were working better.


8. To customize a parody, you need to set up substitution
strings.  This is really all that the YesIWill software
does (though it has some capability for "smart" substitution,
e.g., to handle plurals and capitalization).

So, I edited the ./November19/parody/substitutions.txt file 
to make some strings that seemed to fit the Gutenberg.net
site.  Now, I have a decent parody at 

	http://blue.ils.unc.edu/November19/parody/ils/

in which you can follow through to any page linked from
the transformed Gutenberg.net page.