The Magic of CGI!
Without CGI, there would be no contact forms on web sites,
no live surveys, no shopping carts, no search engines. Web
sites would be static things that provide information and
pretty pictures but offer no interaction.
Imagine this: Someone in Germany can surf to your web site
(which might be located on a computer at a hosting company
in Ontario, Canada) and do a quiz on one of your pages in
exchange for a discount to your membership site.
The credit card purchase might go through a payment gateway
on an internet server located in Chicago, USA. After the
customer's credit card is approved, the customer fills in a
form on your membership site's domain (which might be at a
different hosting company, anywhere in the world) with
preferred username, password, and other information --
and gains instant access as a member.
The quiz results, the customer's contact information, the
discount earned, the purchase particulars, and the new
member's username and other information are automatically
emailed to your mailbox at your ISP, which may be in the
city of Sydney, Australia.
All of that activity takes place in your absence while
you're enjoying a bite of dessert after a particularly
satisfying meal. A few minutes later, you download your
email and say, "Oh, good. Another sale." And you use the
forum in your membership area to personally welcome
the new member.
Without CGI, that magical scenario simply wouldn't happen.
More than CGI is involved, of course. Without the magic of
the internet itself, CGI would be useless.
And, yes, other technologies can do things CGI can do. They
tend to specialize. Some do their job quite well. But CGI
was first, it is still the best in its class, and it
remains the most popular. It is a proven technology that
works with all browsers and requires no plug-ins.
CGI is a method of receiving information provided by site
visitors through their browsers. It's instant. (Well, it
may take a moment or two to process the data.) CGI is also
a method of sending information to visitors, again via
their browsers. Information is received and responded to
automatically. It's two-way communication. It's live. No
webmaster intervention is required.
CGI cooperates well with other technologies, too. For
example, our content syndication programs at the Master
Series (Master Syndicator and Master Syndication Gateway I)
(see /a/11/pl.pl?cgi ) use CGI to
receive content and prepare it for syndication. Then,
JavaScript is used to deliver the content to remote
syndication sites.
The webmasters of your remote syndication sites only need
to paste a couple lines of JavaScript into one web page, at
the spot where they want your content to show up. That's
all they have to do; ever. (Well, they'll need to pay you
every once in a while, if you charge for your content.)
When you put new content into the special form on your site
and click the submit button, all remote syndication sites
with the special JavaScript code on their pages are updated
instantly and automatically.
Pure magic!
With CGI, you can have
- Shopping carts
- Forms
- Database driven sites
- Visitor tracking with real-time reporting
- Interactive server maintenance
- Information retrieved from remote web pages
- Databases updated on remote servers
- And so much more
Take a database-driven site, for example. Every page your
visitor views is freshly generated, live on-the-spot, from
your databases -- products, prices, contact information,
articles, bulletin board threads, everything. When you want
to update information, you do it with a form in your
browser. The moment you click the submit button, the
new information is already available to your visitors.
Yes, just like magic.
With CGI, you can
- Allow your visitors to recommend your web site.
- Let your visitors request information selected from
a check list; it's emailed instantly.
- Automatically rotate content on your site.
- Run a forum.
- Keep a weblog.
- Take a survey.
- Offer a quiz.
- Add new site content, almost automatically.
- Provide a search engine.
- Manage your reciprocal links page.
- Manage subscriber lists and send ezines.
- Keep a password protected "Members Only" web site.
- View the source code of gateway pages, framesets,
other pages normally cloaked by browsers.
You get the idea. Works like magic!
Question:
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Will Bontrager
©2001 Bontrager Connection, LLC
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