How to give visitors free calculators

Without giving them the code

[dickbaker]

I don't know if this is the proper forum for this question or not.

Every day, I come across sites that have financial calculators that the site owner offers for free. With many of them, you get a snippet of code that actually refers back to the "free calculator" site; all of the javascript is kept at that site. And the calculators have a "courtesy of [link]somesite.com[/link]" link.

While researching a competitor's site, I found that he had 139,000 one-way inbound links just from the free calculators he offered. Smart guy.

There are plenty of off-the-shelf financial calculator scripts out there. My thought was that I could modify the look of them (since so many are plain table borders) and offer them to visitors to my site.

But I don't know how to give visitors the free calculators without giving them all of the code.

SSI's? Something else?

Any replies are much appreciated.

[lammert]

JavaScript is executed on the visitors computer, so you have to give them the code in some way. There are obfuscators which make the code slightly unreadable, but this is no real protection.

The only real protection is to run the code on your server--in PHP for example--and use a form to post the parameters to. This has the advantage that the calculator is also available for people with JavaScript disabled. The disadvantage is that you have an extra page load for every calculation, so you should keep you page light weight and fast loading.

[phranque]

you can "obscure the code" if you use an embedded object which is compiled such as java or flash...

[vincevincevince]

AJAX is becoming a popular solution for this.

[jtara]

I'm not quite sure why you care. You say you are going to use "off the shelf" calculators, and modify their look and feel. Couldn't a competitor just go to the same source and get the same calculator, and modify it for their own look and feel?

Yes, AJAX puts you in control, while at the same time consuming your server resources.

[dickbaker]

Thanks for the replies. It sounds as though, if I'm ever going to do this, I'll need someone with more skills than I have.

jtara, it's not a question of competition, but of convenience. There are tons of financial sites related to my niche whose owners lack the skills to copy the javascript to their sites and make changes. So, having a nice-looking calculator with an easy to install script is very convenient for them.

As I said, this competitor I found does really well getting inbound links by doing this.