cgi on ntl

Wheels

I'm looking to host a script on my website that allows people to e-mail me, I've got it all worked out except it says I need to drop it in my cgi bin on my provider. I use NTL and they don't provide ftp support but I can't find a cgi bin at all. Anyone any ideas?

PhantomBeaker

As a general rule service providers very rarely provide CGI unless they actually state it in their ad... in which case they tend to charge more.

If you want to provide a form that allows your users to mail you, there's a fairly primitive version that may or may not work these days.

Create a form and set the action to "mailto:your.email@address" and the method to "POST". Then fill out the code for the rest of the form. That way people fill out the form, hit submit and it all gets emailed to you. Of course, it worked far better in the days of Netscape because the mail client was integrated into the browser, these days people might notice Outlook or Thunderbird opening up in order to send the mail... so it could look rather ugly, but it's an OK hack if you don't have CGI access or any other server side niceties.

Aoife

Wheels

hey thanks for that! After spending all night look at it yesterday I figured I'd just set up a special account with ntl and put a mailto button, less hassle that way.

Another thing I'm trying to figure out is how to avoid search engines, I don't want cralwers etc. to pick it up as its only for clients, is there anyway to do that?

PhantomBeaker

Google a special file called robots.txt - look up the format etc. There's loads of information out there.

What you do is, you create that file, and any honourable bot will look for that before spidering your site. This doesn't work for all of them, but it stops google and other big ones.