Setup CGI Applications with Available Free CGI Scripts

Is CGI easy? Of course it IS for users who have good computer background and know CGI pretty well. How about the users who are not good at programming? Ohh?! Some readers without much programming experience may be stunned by the list of contents even before they seriously begin to work on it and give up. Their reasons sound perfect: they don't know the annoying PERL or C, and most important, they even don't want to learn them. Can these people set up their own CGI application? The answer is YES. When I first set up my own CGI applications (textclock, countdown, and Formail) in 1996, I was so excited to see how great they were working. But unforunatly at that time I even didn't know how to program with PERL, what CGI really was. But anyway, they run perfect and they were made by myself! That's made me crazy!

Most often, the CGI users are not programmers. They include CGI applications in their web pages to add some useful features, or just make their web pages look cool. It's not neccessary for them to know every details of CGI and programming. They can easily take other people's works and use them directly.

In fact, there are lots of web sites which maintain free CGI scripts that can be freely downloaded. Usually these sites also provide the README files to help you set up your own application. What you need to do is just download the script to your server (modify some system parameters is necessary), follow the README file step to step. It will work!

One of the best sites that provide free CGI scripts is Matt's Script Archive. In this site, there are many useful CGI scripts such as Guestbook, Formail,etc written in several programming languages such as PERL and C. We thanks to Matt Wright for his great efforts to provide so many useful CGI scripts for us. In this lecture we will use Matt's Script Archive 's PERL scripts as examples.

Note the following examples are directly downloaded from Matt's Script Archive, unlike the examples in prevoius lectures where the codes are developed by myself.

Download Site Genearl Information

• Overview - what this application is and its main function
• Readme - How to set up the application
• Downloading - files need to download
• Working Demo - examples
• Frequently Asked Question - help and debug
• etc..

Textclock

Let's start with this simple one. It is nothing but when you click Get Textclock Time, you can get the current date and time.

Let's see how to do that:

1. First go to the Matt's Script Archive main page.
2. Then click the Textclock in the Matt's Perl CGI Scripts catagory, you should get here : http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/textclock.shtml.
3. Go to the Downloading and transfer the textclock.pl to your machine and put it in a directory that have permission to execute CGI.( Reference to Where to Put CGI Program lecture). You'd better first ask your system administrator or webmaster to make sure which directory can run CGI program. For this example, I put this file in the /home/CGITutorial/cgi-bin directory in my machine, which has permission to execute CGI.
4. Change the textclock.pl's mode to be executble issuing the following command:

    chmod 755 textclock.pl

5. Now embed an anchor in your home page:

    <a href="cgi-bin/textclock.pl"> Get Textclock Time</a>

6. The above source code look like this in your homepage:
   Get Textclock Time
   

Countdown

Countdown is an interesting CGI program which allows you to countdown to a specific date of your choice (e.g., holidys, birthdays, anniversaries).

Here are the steps:

1. First go to the Matt's Script Archive main page.
2. Then click the COUNTDOWN in the Matt's Perl CGI Scripts catagory, you should get here : http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/countdown.shtml.
3. Go to the Downloading and transfer the countdown.pl and countdown.html to your machine and put countdown.pl in a directory that have permission to execute CGI. Here I still put both files in the /home/CGITutorial directory in my machine, which has permission to execute CGI.
4. Change the countdown.pl's mode to be executble issuing the following command:

    chmod 755 countdown.pl

5. Now we need to modify the countdown.html:

   <html><head><title>Countdown Examples</title></head>
   <body><h3>Want to know how long till the year 2010?</h3>
   <a href="cgi-bin/countdown.pl?2010,1,2,0,0,0">Countdown to 
   the year 2010!</a>
   <p>
   <hr>
   <p>
   Or make your own date!!!
   <form method=GET action="http://your.domain/cgi-bin/mattw/countdown.pl">
   <input type=text name=""> (Format: yyyy,mm,dd,hh,mm,ss)
   <p>
   <input type=submit>
   </form><p>
   <hr>
   <p>
   <a href="http://your.domain/cgi-bin/countdown.pl">Get the default 
   countdown!</a>
   <p>
   <hr>
   <p>
   <h3>Ignore the # of seconds in countdown to 2010</h3>
   <a href="http://your.domain/cgi-bin/countdown.pl?2010,1,2,0,0,XX">Countdown to 
   the year 2010!</a>
   </body></html>
   

   Change the above red URL to whatever your countdown.pl locate, here it is:

   cgi-bin/countdown.pl

6. Save the modified countdown.html.

FormMail

Let's see how to do that:

1. First go to the Matt's Script Archive main page.
2. Then click the FORMMAIL in the Matt's Perl CGI Scripts catagory, you should get here : http://worldwidemart.com/scripts/formmail.shtml.
3. Go to the Downloading and transfer the FormMail.pl to your machine and put it in a directory that have permission to execute CGI. For this example, I still put this file in the /home/CGITutorial/cgi-bin directory in my machine.
4. There's one line we need to modify in the FormMail.pl:

   @referers = ('worldwidemart.com','206.31.72.203');

   This should change to your machine's Domain name and IP address. This statement is there mainly for security reason.It prevents the user from other machine to use your scripts. So I change to my server:

   @referers = ('zhanshou.hypermart.net',' 63.251.5.138');

5. Change the FormMail.pl's mode to be executble issuing the following command:

    chmod 755 FormMail.pl

6. Create a HTML Form file "formmail.html":

   <html>
   <head><title>Send Your Comments</title></head>
   <center><h1>Send Your Comments</h1>
   <form method=POST action="cgi-bin/FormMail.pl">
   <INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="recipient" VALUE="zhanshou@hotmail.com">
   <INPUT TYPE=HIDDEN NAME="subject"   VALUE="CGI Tutorial Feedbook">
   <PRE>
   Your Name:      <INPUT NAME="realname" TYPE="TEXT" SIZE="20" MAXLENGTH="30">
   E-mail address: <INPUT NAME="email" TYPE="TEXT" SIZE="20" MAXLENGTH="30">
   Your comments : 
              <TEXTAREA NAME="comments" ROWS="4" COLS="30">
   </TEXTAREA>
           <INPUT TYPE="SUBMIT" VALUE="Send">      <INPUT TYPE="RESET">
   </PRE>
   </form>
   </html>
   

   Note that the zhanshou@hotmail.com is the email address where you want people to send you this message.
7. Now when you open the formmail.html page, it will work!

WWWBoard

WWWBoard is a discussion message board that allow people to post questions and answers.

Web Search Engine

Web Search Engine is a search engine that allow people to search the web pages under specified root directories. For example, you can set up a search engine that search all the pages under the "www" dirctory in your web server. The search engine in "Table of Content" page of this tutorial was set up with Matt's Script. Click here to run search engine.

TextCounter

There is a working example in "Table of Content" page of this tutorial to record the page hits.

Random Text and Random Image

Each time you load the pages, the text and the image are randomly displayed.