Membership Services: Dynamic Content

Dynamic Content
Building pages on the fly

· Text counter
· Graphical counter
· Download counter
· Voting booth

· Message boards
· Search Engine
· Server-side includes
· Custom CGIs

Text counter:

This program counts the number of viewers who load the page off the server and inserts the current count into the page. To use it, put the following in the page:

Since the count is actually a part of the document, it can be modified with FONT and other HTML tags.

Graphical counter:

This program counts the number of viewers of your site and creates an image showing the current count. To use it, sites with their own domain or subdomain should insert the following in the page:

<img src="/cgi-bin/count.pl">

Sites located in subdirectories should use this (replacing dir with the name of your site's directory) instead:

<img src="/cgi-bin/count.pl/dir">

In either case, the graphical counter defaults to a red digital display (like the one at the bottom the entrance page) and pads numbers smaller than 100 with zeroes. You can easily change those, though.

Download counter:

The download counter tracks how many times each file in a directory is accessed (downloaded). The directory is tagged inside the server, so files can be uploaded and downloaded normally. The data can be accessed two ways:

/cgi-bin/dl-count.pl/path/file
ex.: /cgi-bin/dl-count.pl/emulators/meka.zip
This will return the number of times that file has been downloaded, so you can can SSI it into a page like
This has been downloaded  times

/cgi-bin/dl-count.pl?report
This creates a table showing each file downloaded, the number of downloads, and the first time it was downloaded.

Because the directories are tagged within the server, you must e-mail the admins to set it up.

Voting booth:

This voting booth (a.k.a. opinion poll) was custom made for use here at Emulation World. Among its features are double vote blocking and the ability to rotate several active polls at once. It also allows for a virtually unlimited number of active polls and choices per poll.

Unlike most of the programs available here, this does require some quick setup before it will be usful. Head over here to find out more.

Message boards:

The global message boards are based on a heavily customized version of WWWThreads. It sports a powerful search engine, multiple forums, automatic quoting, and allows banning ofhosts and users. Each site can define their own header and color set.

Users can define their own profile and and signature. They can also customize many settings including reading threads one post at a time or in one flat page, listing threads in collapsed or expanded views, and can adjust how threads are sorted. They can also choose fonts and sizes, among other options.

New forums must be created by Account Management, but you have full control over your forums once they are created. The color scheme can be adjusted using by putting a threads.cfg file in the root level of your site, like this example.

Search Engine:

Our search program is driven by the SWISH++ engine with a custom built, highly customizable front end. Each subdomain has their own index, which is rebuilt nightly. To let your readers use the search, insert this code into a page

<FORM ACTION="cgi-bin/site-search">
<INPUT TYPE=text NAME=query>
<INPUT TYPE=SUBMIT VALUE="Search">
</FORM>

Of course, the defaults probably don't match your site very well or offer users as many options. So here's how you can dress it up to fit your needs.

Server-side includes:

Server-Side Includes allow you to embed files, CGI output, and other information into your web pages. All of the merging is done by the Web server, so browsers see it as one, simple page.

Here are a couple of the more useful SSI commands. You can find details on the rest at Apache.org. In each case, the specified URL may not contain a hostname (the URL must be from your own site).

ex: 

This will put the contents of the file (or the output of the CGI, as in the above example) into your page. This is useful for using the same information in multiple pages (like the menu at the bottom of this page).


This returns the date the requested file was last modified.

ex: 

This will print the date the specified file was last modified. This can be used on a news file to return the last time news was added, among other possibilities.

Custom CGIs:

Although Emulation World offers several CGI programs to all sites, we can't offer everything you could want (nor do we try). Instead, we allow you to install your own CGIs. The server will assume any file ending in .cgi is a CGI program.

When writing or installing your own CGI programs, these are a few common snares people encounter:

The /userid/web you see in FTP is only a link to the Web servers. The actual directory of your Web site is much different and can change without warning. Therefore, we recommend working from the DOCUMENT_ROOT environment variable since that always points to your site's directory. That appears as $ENV{DOCUMENT_ROOT} in perl.
In Unix, execution permission is seperate from read permission. You must add that permission before the server will run your program.
For security purposes, CGI programs are run with their owner's access, but not the owner's group access. Therefore, the owner of the CGI program must also be the owner of any files and directories the program will be writing to.

Membership Services Getting Started Dynamic Content Other Features

Last updated June 30, 1999 by Brian Rahn