Use Bourne Shell/BASH/Korn Shell/etc. as your CGI language? To me it would be the perfect fit with NanoBlogger to do my server side scripting. A short (but crude) example:

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#!/bin/bash
 
echo "Content-type: text/html"
echo ""
 
cat << EOF
<html>
<head><title>Your environment variables</title></head>
<body>
EOF
 
env
 
cat << EOF
 
</body>
</html>
EOF
exit 0

Put this in in a file called test.cgi and put that file somewhere in a directory where your web page is hosted. Make sure that the following is set on test.sh:


chmod 755 yourdir
chmod 755 yourdir/test.cgi

Now point your browser to http://www.yourdomain.com/<yourdir>/test.cgi and behold, a nice overview of the environment variables your provider provides for you!

I think this is the perfect way to make a NanoBlogger powered site more interactive. Here are some nice examples of the things that can be done using Shell CGI scripting.

Although a comments addition for NanoBlogger can be found here I think I could give it a shot to implement the same functionality using Shell scripting. Not that I am opposed to using PHP and MySQL, but using Shell scripts seems a bit more pure to me in combination with NanoBlogger.

If there are any disadvantages and reasons why Shell scripting should not be used for this I would be glad to hear about it.

Update:
I renamed test.sh to test.cgi as my browser suggested to download the script rather then being executed on the server. And quotes have been put around “Content-type: text/html”. It is probably not necessary, but I like consistency.