Curtis Thompson
Forum Replies Created
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hello…
if it’s a post form, then you can get the variable from either the $_POST or $HTTP_POST_VARS array…if it’s a get form, then replace the “POST” in the above array names with “GET”…which of these to use depends on your version of php…the script likely uses them itself, so check for either of these…
so assuming it’s a get form, you would do:
if (!$subject) { $subject = “# of Attendees: {$_GET[“attendees”]}”; }note 2 things:
1. the “attendees” variable in the _GET array is the form field name for your attendees field
2, the { and } brackets around the variable are so that you can have a variable with quotes in it inside a quoted string – you can also do it this way (same thing, but in theory a few millionths of a millisecond slower because the engine has to make a string buffer first):
if (!$subject) { $subject = “# of Attendees: “.$_GET[“attendees”]; }make sense?
sitruc
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hello…
the low-budget way is to just make the file itself the link…otherwise, you can get fancy and make a scripted page that streams binary content with the file’s mime type, but the former usually works well enough for people…
but the latter does offer the ability to stream as a raw octet stream, which means that the user’s browser won’t recognize it and try to open it for you inline, which might be what you’re trying to get around (the user gets a file download dialog and they can save it wherever they want or just open it)…
sitruc
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hello…
i’ve written a free tool for this in the past – it requires php and the ability for safe mode to be disabled in said php (check with your isp), but if you support both (the latter is not so much required for running but for clients to be able to upload files to your server via the tool – it’s a security thing) then you are free to use it:
https://www.sitruc.com/downloads/php_client_area.zip
it’s got an install and suggestions for seeing if you can run it in the _INSTALL.txt file…
sitruc
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hello…
ya – the basics are don’t have image maps for navigation (either images or text is fine), and in general keep in mind that flash and image content won’t get indexed, meaning that if you go that route, all you’ll have to rely on is your keywords and description meta tags…not as good. and don’t try to hide text at the bottom of the page in the same color as your background…google, et al are reallly working to see through that sort of thing…
plain text is always better if you have a site that needs to show up high on search engines…
sitruc
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hello…
i really wouldn’t worry about it – it was meant to tell robots how to index your site and what you wanted them to see and not see…but the reality is that unless you have stuff you want to hide from engines, the only engines that would listen to it (the major ones) are probably the ones that you want to index as much of your content as possible. the ones you don’t want or need won’t bother following the robots.txt file anyway…
but that’s just me…
sitruc
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hello…
i’m not going to break down what each tag does here, because that sort of information is readily available via google…like here, for example:
https://vancouver-webpages.com/META/metatags.detail.html
but to be polite and helpful to search engines (and therefore yourself), you would want keywords and description (as mentioned before). robot metas are for polite search engines, and most of the major ones are.
to attempt to eliminate caching of your pages (not good in most cases), you can use these:
META HTTP-EQUIV=”expires” CONTENT=”Sat, 11 Sep 2010 09:00:00 CMT”
META HTTP-EQUIV=”Pragma” CONTENT=”no-cache”
META HTTP-EQUIV=”Cache-Control” CONTENT=”no-cache”you can set the character type of your page here (again not usually needed unless you have utf-8 content or the likes and need to explicity state that for the browser to know about):
meta HTTP-EQUIV=”Content-Type” content=”text/html; charset=iso-8859-1″
and the refresh tag will refresh your page to a different url after a specified amount of time…
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hello…
i’ll number my answers here as well…
1. typically they will re-crawl sites monthly to update their index, so you shouldn’t have to worry about that. what you want to make sure you do is not delete pages that might be indexed as then they will end up as 404’s when people visit (which is sort of your question for #3, which we’ll get to)…but in general you don’t want to delete a major section or page but rather change it to say “hey we’ve updated our site – update your bookmark and then click here to go to the new page”…or better yet, keep the same page urls in your new version.
2. you can either search our archives for discussions on meta tags (we’ve talked about them in the past) or you could get the basics here:
https://www.seologic.com/faq/meta-tags.php
keywords and description are the ones that you probably should care about the most…
3. yes. there are numerous ways, but typically these are done at the webserver level. depending on your isp hosting plan, you have a few options. the most likely case is that they are running apache, in which case they might allow you to control certain web functions via .htaccess files – with an .htaccess file, you can dictate a custom page for any type of web error (403, 404, 500, etc.). best thing to check on first is if the host for this site allows you to use .htaccess files (and if they are running apache to begin with – that’s functionality that is apache-specific)…
sitruc
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hello…
ahh – that’s an (unfortunately) simple one – you cannot hide that. it’s an ie-windows specific thing and you basically have no control over it…
sorry – hate to be the bearer of bad news…i thought you were referring to the browser toolbar…. :-/
sitruc
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hello…
nope – there is no meta tag that will do that. javascript can do it, but you need to open a window once the user gets to your site with toolbars turned off…and i would not recommend that for a variety of usability reasons…
it’s the type of site that you come to and it either opens a window automatically (bad) or it says “click here for my site” (equally a usability no-no)…but that way you can control the user’s browser.
but think about it – you’re trying to get people to hire you. while you want to go all out to make a presentation to convice them that you’re the best, i think it’s generally true that you’re going to wow them a lot more if you can do a presentation without changing their user experience. if you have to alter their browser to show them your work, what will they think you have to do to sell them when you do their work?
this is all just personal opinion, of course. if you want to have a popup window with your site after they come to yours (as you can’t remove the toolbar from an existing window), you can do so with this type of thing:
https://irt.org/script/947.htm
or you could apply this example i did for another question:
https://www.sitruc.com/cow/popup/page.html
(replace the quicktime html page with your page and put it on your box)
lemme know if you have any additional questions on how to do that!
sitruc
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hello…
if you’re referring to general ways people can download images from your site to their disk, then don’t worry about it, as you really can’t stop them from doing it… 🙁
was that what you were referring to?
sitruc