Forum Moderators: phranque
I am new to HTML and CSS (and totally ignorant about other web languages, sorry).
The situation is this: my high school buddy is stricken with leukemia. I have set up a webpage for his appeal for bone marrow donors. Now, I will like to set up a Guestbook for well-wishers to post messages.
I visited a site like bravenet.com , and it appears that they can host a guestbook for free.
On the other hand, I am also thinking of hosting the guestbook on my own domain. Will the experts please recommend sites that offer such services, source code, etc?
Sorry to hear about your friend.
You can install a free perl script on your server. If you follow the instructions step by step, there should be no problem. Ask your web host if you can have a cgi-bin. Most of them offer it in basic service.
Go at hotscripts.com and hit perl to find one that suits you.
Let us know how the install goes. Perl scripts can sometimes seem/be troublesome.
Do not hesitate to post here with more questions if you have them.
:) Y
I downloaded "Free Perl Guestbook" from [vitinh.de...] (mods: please edit away this URI if it is not needed, thanks) and extracted the zip file, which contains only one file: "guestbook.cgi".
I FTP onto my web space, and there is already a "cgi-bin" folder there (separate from the "html" folder). So I upload the file into the "cgi-bin" folder, and "CHMOD" the file to 755, as indicated on the installation guide.
Now, the guide tells me to access "mydomain.com/cgi-bin/guestbook.cgi" in order to start the installation, and so I did. What happens? I get the following:
HTTP 500: Internal Server Error
The page cannot be displayed
There is a problem with the page you are trying to reach and it cannot be displayed.
What do I do now? My web hosting package uses Unix, and I checked my package features, and it claims to support user's own cgi-bin. Also, I checked the cgi file using a text editor and the first line does begin with that "#!/usr/local/bin/perl" thingie.
Everything seems alright now.
Thank you.
I inserted the following into robots.txt:
User-agent: *
Disallow : /cgi-bin/
(cos the cgi file is located in that folder)
What other hardcore (pardon the slight pun) steps can I take to minimize all kinds of spidering of the guestbook page?
I have been looking through threads to do with guestbook(s). The stuff about setting up "spider traps" is mind boggling me!
html is already disabled by default. The URI for the guestbook ends with the .cgi extension, and I guess the guestbook is dynamic, in the sense that when people sign the guestbook, the data file containing the contents of their messages is refreshed.
I will send a message to the creator of the guestbook and ask him if he can add the robots.txt meta tag.
Although it's dynamic, it is based on a template. Look into the code and see if there's a <head> section, then drop the above meta tag into it.
