• Internet Club NEWS

• ADVANCED Web Features
  • Using Graphical ACCESS COUNTERS

  • Using IMAGE MAPS

  • Restricting Access With PASSWORDS

  • ROBOTS (or Web Crawlers!)

• Hot WEB SITES

• Send Your CONTRIBUTIONS

Internet Club News

New Members and their E-mail Addresses

Tony Atherton	[email protected]
James Brown	[email protected]
Alan Groves	[email protected]
Damian Hill	[email protected]
Jon Miller	[email protected]
Ronnie Wilson	[email protected]
Terry Yates	[email protected]

A very warm welcome to all new members! Please feel free to make your contributions to our club pages, and, if you have any comments or suggestions,
please send me an E-mail.

Best regards, Phil Nevin.

New Internet Cafe Opens in Liverpool .....

We are pleased to announce the opening of the latest in the chain of Tarantula Internet Cafes in Bold Street, Liverpool, and that the management has agreed that our fortnightly meetings can be held there! Our first meeting at the Cafe will take place on Thursday 7th November at 08:00.

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Advanced Web Features

Using Graphical Access Counters

Please note that the following information is based on using Demon Internet's web server "hit counter" facility, which is provided free of charge to all Demon Internet account holders. Other ISP's will have a similar facility - contact their Customer Support desk for details.

To add a "hit counter" showing the number of times your home page has been visited, position the following tag (enclosed between the usual angled brackets <.....>) in the appropriate position in your home page:

IMG SRC="http://www.demon.co.uk/cgi-bin/Counter.cgi?nnnnnnnnnn.index.html

where nnnnnnnnnn is your account name with Demon Internet. Note that the counter can only be started with an initial value of 0 (zero).

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Using Image Maps

The following information is compliant with the NCSA imagemap standard. The latest NCSA imagemap program can be found in your Internet Service Provider's cgi-bin directory.

The basic steps involved in creating an imagemap are as follows:

Create your imagemap file and store it in your /docs directory; then use the following URL (replacing the square brackets with angled brackets) to refer to the map:

[A HREF="filename.map"] [IMG SRC="file.gif" ISMAP] [/A]

An example imagemap setup can be found at: http://www.demon.co.uk/test/.

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Restricting Access with Passwords

Most ISP's, including Demon Internet, utilise the Apache Web Server, which supports the htaccess password mechanism. This facility enables a "rules" file called .htaccess to be included in a particular directory, which forces users to enter a valid User Name and Password before they can access any file in that directory. The details entered are checked against a .htpasswd file, the location of which is indicated in the "rules" file.

Detailed instructions for the above procedure can be found at:

http://www.demon.net/www/comweb/faq/htsingle.html.

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Robots (or Web Crawlers!)

Robots, also called Web spiders or crawlers, are programs which automatically retrieve documents and all the documents listed within each document. These robots are used to create lists of Web page addresses accessible by search engines such as YAHOO!. Robots must firstly access a file called /robots.txt to look for instructions about the site and this ensures that Web site occupiers can control access to specific pages or, if the /robots.txt file is empty, restrict access completely.

Further information concerning robots can be found at:

http://info.webcrawler.com/mak/projects/robots/faq.html

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Hot Web Sites

The following sites are highly recommended:

FAQ: The Ten Commandments of HTML

FAQ: The World Wide Web

HTML Bad Style Page

High Five Award Page

Yahoo!

The Latest from Microsoft

Netscape's Ever-changing Home Page

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Send Your Contributions

Internet Club Members can send their contributions via E-Mail. Please ensure that your membership number and password appear on the first line of the E-mail message. Not all contributions will be published - the editor's decision is final; but please keep your contributions brief and topical.

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