CGI Common Gateway Interface

CGI is Common Gateway Interface. Ourworld does not offer this; if you are on Ourworld then you would have to go to another contractor who will do it for you for a small fee.

Other ISPs have an area for you to use, next to the place where you put your website, sometimes called CGI-BIN, into which you can load programs written in languages like PERL or C.

CGI is a reliable way of controlling what the surfers do. There are many off-the-shelf programs available, not least from Matt's Script Archive http://www.worldwidemart.com/scripts/ These include hit counters, search facilities, guest books and lots of others. Your ISP probably has some CGI facilities set up already for you to use.

In most cases you will have to include a calling sequence on the page where the CGI script will operate. The calling sequence will normally be in <!-- comments --> so that it is not actually seen by the punters.

You will probably also want to modify the CGI script itself following the instructions that come with the script. This you can do in Wordpad or Notepad. Keep a copy of the original in case you screw up. Save your amended script to the name specified using Save As MS-DOS Text option.

To be specific, I have used it as follows:

Response Forms
Website Search on the Sitemap
The Countdown demo

I have also included a counter on this page and you will have noted that the page name has an .shtml extension so this script is run automatically on first loading, and it will increment if you refresh the page. The calling sequence for this script, as an example, is <!--#include virtual="/cgi-bin/counter" -->

You are visitor number: [an error occurred while processing this directive] to surf to this page since 1st March when it was created.

The problem using such a counter is firstly:

• Everyone can see how few hits you have had,

• For a counter (on my server at least) the page has to have the .shtml extension so that the counter will increment as soon it is loaded. Only pages with .shtml extensions are scanned for CGI scripts. This makes retro-fitting it to an existing page very difficult, particularly the homepage where you would like it, because all the existing links to that page will be wrong.