Hijack-proof forms. Surveys. List building.
Solid, safe website tools.
Whatever your need, Will Bontrager builds powerful software solutions.
Solid, safe website tools.
Whatever your need, Will Bontrager builds powerful software solutions.
Web Development HelpAccepting Credit Cards with Your Own Secure Server Advanced Email Link Generator (with Anti-Spam Encoder) Affiliate Links for Non-Product Pages Our affiliates can link to any page of any of our web sites and have their affiliate cookie set. I'll tell you how it's done. Maybe you'll find a use for something similar. For affiliates, it's just link and go. Implementing the mechanism wasn't so straightforward. A Good and Strong Password Generator This article presents a few concepts that, if kept in mind, can result in better and stronger passwords. An Information Center with Master Form V4 The Information Center is a web page with a form where selected information can be sent to specific email addresses. The information can be text files, compressed files, PDF documents, entire web pages, anything that can be sent as an email attachment. A "Reveal When Needed" Feedback Form This article is about implementing a feedback form, hidden until a link is clicked. The primary hurdle was to replace the form with the thank-you page, seamlessly, without a page reload. You'll see how it was solved. And without AJAX, too. Attention-Getting Inserts (with Generator) Inserts (where the text flows around an object) are attention-getting; They can be an ad, a famous quote, a quote pulled from the article itself, a testimonial, or a limited-time offer. And they are easy. Automatic PayPal Payment Email Response Today, I'll show you how to set up an automatic response to payment received notification email from PayPal. Be a Good Host; Let Your Visitors Speak When a person writes about something they're very excited about, their writing may be interpreted incorrectly as a sales pitch. I'll try to keep my enthusiasm controlled. Browser Sensitive Bookmark Prompts Many feel certain a secure server connection means information is secure. But that's not so. With a secure server connection, only the transmission of information between browser and server is secure. If you want to require an email address, or an agreement to receive promotions or to participate in an activity, in exchange for a freebie, this article is for you. The book's title is "Creating Cool Web Sites with HTML, XHTML, and CSS." It's paperbound, 400 pages. In addition to what the title implies, it covers design techniques, traffic building, CGI, JavaScript, and RSS. This week's "Creating HTML Email" Possibilities ezine article is about creating HTML email that renders well in a variety of email reading software. Background effects achieved with CSS takes on a new dimension. Part 2 of Backgrounds takes a deeper look at what can be achieved with CSS. Jazz up your web page forms with CSS. CSS; Consistent Form Field Sizes It can be frustrating to design a form so it looks good, then test it on another browser and have the design fall apart. CSS to the rescue... A simple tutorial that will get you started using Cascading Style Sheets. Part 2 of the CSS tutorial series explains embedded style sheets and how to create "classes". Custom Icon for Browser Favorites List When Microsoft introduced what they called the Shortcut Icon for IE5's favorites list, many articles appeared on the Internet about how to create them and use them. Now, not much is heard about them, although information is still to be found on the Internet — provided one knows what to search for. Customizing Emails Your Scripts Send Dear WebMaster, What's New on Your Site? It seems difficult enough to add new content consistently to your site, but needing to let people know "What's New" when they land is another little chore to manage. Designing Consistent Form Field Sizes It can be frustrating to design a form so it looks good, then test it on another browser and have the design fall apart. It is for site owners whose sites are crippled by popup blockers, and those who are otherwise curious about which or how many of their visitors actually do have effective blockers, that this article is written. Download and Redirect with One Click Would you like to provide a download link for your site visitors that begins the download and then sends the browser to a different web page? Dropdown Navigation Menu Generator Bar graphs can be a precise aid to quickly conveying quantitative information. A pull quote on a web page is a section of text pulled out of web page content and presented in an attention-getting way. They're usually thought-provoking or enticing excerpts. Easy Time Zone Offset Calculator Effectively Requiring Both Cookies and JavaScript Before Submitting a Form We needed was a method of ensuring cookies are turned on before the form is submitted, to give the member the opportunity to change the browser's settings before voting. Free Software and Services From The Bontrager Team It occurred to me that our free software and free services are scattered about various domains. A central list for reference would certainly be in order Free Ways To Hide Files From Snoopers Sometimes database files must be protected from scrutiny. Files with email addresses or credit card information come to mind. Hide and Reveal Content, On Demand Busy webpages can benefit from these easy "Hide and Reveal Content" techniques. Make extra information available to the visitor - on the same page they are viewing Hide and Reveal Content, On Demand: How It Works Hide and reveal content on a webpage. CSS is the key. JavaScript is the switch. Imagine a restaurant that serves many hundreds of thousands of clients every day. Nobody knows how many clients there really are. It might be millions. Or even billions. They're everywhere. How To Make A One-Click Poll for Text Email I'll show you how to make a one-click poll for your outgoing plain text (or HTML) email. Making short URLs out of long ones is a snap with ProLinkz™ and rewrite module lines in the .htaccess file (rewrite module line generator included in the article). HTML Character Codes at Your Fingertips HTML Character Codes (HTML Entities) are the codes that make those useful symbols that I often can't recall how to make. An example is the © code for the copyright symbol character, which prints a "c" in a circle. This article puts the codes at our fingertips. HTML Tooltips With CSS Enhancements You're probably aware that when a cursor hovers over text affected by a TITLE attribute, the value assigned to the attribute shows up as a tooltip. This article shows you examples of how using that one attribute can make your web sites more visitor-friendly. We do a lot of development, a lot of testing, and sometimes we neglect to remove the test files. This has been going on for 8 years. Insert Tracking Information into Your Pages Integrating with Payment Gateways Integrating software with payment gateways can be a confusing subject. Different payment gateways offer different options. Options are given unique and sometimes not-so-intuitive names. I'll try to de-confuse it a bit. JavaScript Code Generator for Mouse-Over Double Image Rollover Latin-1 entities are accented/composite and other special characters encoded to tell browsers what character to print. Many Ways To Measure Downloads How many people are clicking your download links? If only a few, you might want to offer something different. If many, you might want to expand your offerings. Many Ways To Use the IFRAME Tag The IFRAME tag is rather simple to implement. It's a window, of sorts, embedded in your web page. The window can contain content from other URLs. Moving Our Sites To a New Server All of our domains, except willmaster.com, have been moved to the new hosting account. This article contains notes about what we did and, in one instance, what would have been done differently. Multiple Form Submission Prevention Several methods exist to prevent users from clicking a form's submit button more than once. Their effectiveness ranges from merely alerting the user that the form is being processed to an essentially 100% effective duplicate block. No-Kill Pop Box (Instead of Popups) Today you will learn about a way to present the information previously put in popup windows, yet popup killers can't kill this pop box! A pop box is content within a rectangular area that might or might not be visually similar to a pop-up, but which displays on top of the content of the current web page rather than in a separate window of its own. This article provides the means to use cookies so your No-Kill Pop Box is displayed only once to a visitor for a pre-determined number of days. For any of many possible reasons, sometimes it is desirable to have the browser open a new window for the new page when a link is clicked. One would think counting page loads is a trivial task. Simply increment a count whenever a browser loads the page. Thinking about it a bit, one realizes the mechanism that records page loads is likely to be less than 100% accurate. Password Protect Any PHP Page With MMO Password protect any PHP web page. Anywhere on your domain. Password protect as many individual web pages as you want. The latest version of Master Members Only (version 3.5) lets you do exactly that Problem Solved; Access by many without compromising information Problem Solved; Tracking affiliate codes from one domain to another When you need a "short URL", in an email or ezine for example, ProLinkz(TM) will manage it nicely for you. And it will track the click-thrus, too. As you can imagine, at WillMaster.com we receive a lot of questions -- about our scripts and about CGI in general. Reducing the Risk Of Providing Site Recommend Forms Without certain protections in place, "recommend this site" forms are more vulnerable to misuse than contact and most other types of forms. That's because a message typed by the user is sent to an email address the user provides. Resizing Form Fields with JavaScript Some web sites can benefit from a touch of "Wow"; something fun to catch the visitor's attention. Revealing the Magical Place Where Web Pages Live This is an article for raw newbies, intended as an introduction to a class about the basics of creating web pages. Reveal Your Hidden Email Addresses Still not sure about RSS? Don't worry; you are not alone. We'll try to clear the air and find out if RSS can be useful for you. Almost any server task that needs to be done according to a schedule, and doesn't require direct human supervision, can be set up with Unix/Linux cron. When you are viewing a page with an https://... URL and the lock on your browser is closed, it means you have a secure connection to a server. The server on a secure connection is often thought of as a "secure server," but that isn't necessarily true. Secure Servers and Information Security When you are viewing a page with an https://... URL and the lock on your browser is closed, it means you have a secure connection to a server. The server on a secure connection is often thought of as a "secure server," but that isn't necessarily true. Server Side Includes; Navigation Links Server Side Includes (SSI) technology can be used to include the same content on many pages. But when it is used for including the same navigation menus on every page, there is one big drawback -- the menu item for the current page links to the current page. Short URLs and Redirection Without CGI Site Moving Tips: Things To Consider When Moving From One Server To Another Some Hazards of Accepting CC Info On One's Own Secure Server Spammers are now using automated form submission software. Automated form submission, as addressed in this article, is software masquerading as your form and submitting information. Your form handling software is unable to determine whether it is a person or other software submitting the form. Several methods of hiding email addresses from spammer's harvesting robots. You'll also learn how to providing visitor feedback opportunities without disclosing an email address anywhere on the web page or in the source code for human or robot. Special Character Code Generator This collection of SSI tags are less well known but still highly useful for webpage business. An easy to use webpage building tool- keep multiple pages updated with a change on only one file. Display the output of CGI programs: live news/weather information retrieved from remote sites, your current "latest news".... Testing Your Forms for Hijacking Vulnerability Why should I test my form? Because hijackers send their spew from your server. Because you could get on blacklists that are very hard to get off of. Because you could lose your hosting account. Because your hosting company could shame you. The Ins and Outs of Accepting Online Payments If you are contemplating doing business on the Internet, at some point you have to figure out how to actually get the money from your customer's pocket into your own. What real-time process will you use to collect payment? It's easy to start a blog. But effort and consistency are required to maintain one. This is simply a list of nine Perl code snippets that I use often and keep handy for copying and pasting. Useful Statistics for Variable Content CGI Scripts When you're on a Unix/Linux server and you want server software to launch at certain times and dates, you use cron. I will show you how to make a file that cron can use. When you need to submit a form to another script without human intervention, this article can get you started. You'll find a browser-emulation script that will submit form field information (that you specify) automatically. Web Page Form Anti-Hijacking Considerations A devious method of hijacking a form is to insert line breaks into form fields that will be used in email headers. After the first line break, the spammer can insert a Bcc: line with a thousand email addresses (an arbitrary number, which could be more or less depending on how many addresses the spammer thinks your server can handle in one gulp). |
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© 1998-2001 William and Mari Bontrager |
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