Setting up forms
Web page counters
Chris Skardon's Frontpage Help
How to use our *NEW* FileMail system
How to use our *NEW* CoolMail system
How to use our *NEW* CGICheck system

Setting up forms

Please use above *new* CGI's in your pages and if possible migrate your existing pages to using them. Here's how you'd set up forms on our system. First you must say that you're setting out a form, along with what program to use to handle the data from the form.

Attention! To make this work the cgi-bin file must have a .cgi extension, eg genmail.cgi

<!-- Form string -->
<FORM method=post action=http://home.fastnet.co.uk/cgi-bin/genmail.cgi>

Then you can write a page including the boxes you want to be filled in. For example:

<EM>Please enter your Name</EM><BR>
<INPUT NAME="Name" TYPE="text" VALUE="" SIZE="30" MIN="5">

Please enter your Name

or perhaps

<EM>Extra Information:</EM><BR>
<TEXTAREA ROWS="3" COLS="40" NAME="Info"> </TEXTAREA>

Extra Information:

The following example puts in a button to submit the form:

<INPUT type="submit" value="Press to send name">

An email will be sent with the values of the various boxes that were filled in. You need to say where this email will go to:

<!-- Here's where I define who gets the email -->
<INPUT type="hidden" name="Recipient" value="yourmail@fastnet.co.uk">
 
<!-- Here's where I define the subject for the email -->
<INPUT type="hidden" name="Subject" value="Form details">

You can change the message output when a form is submitted:

<INPUT type="hidden" name="Response" value="Thank you for submitting your 
details.  Please call again!">

or you can have personalised pages for blank returns and thankyou returns...

<!-- Here's where I define the URL if the user submits a blank form -->
<!-- INPUT type="hidden" name="Blank" value="blank.html" -->
                                                                         
<!-- Here's where I define the URL if the user submits an OK form -->
<!-- INPUT type="hidden" name="Goto" value="formOK.html"-->

Here's an example of the mail you might get in return:

Date: Wed, 12 Feb 1997 10:05:31 GMT
To: yourmail@fastnet.co.uk
Subject: Form details

Name = My name
Info = My info
-------------------------------
Remote Host: ns1.fast.net.uk
Remote IP: 194.207.104.2
User Agent: Mozilla/3.01Gold (X11; I; Linux 1.2.13 i586) via Harvest Cache 
version 1.4pl3
Referer: http://www.home.fastnet.co.uk/extra.html

Web page counters

You may add counters to your web pages. There are various digit styles and you can even put a clock or the current date on your web page. To add a counter to your page, include the following line:

<IMG SRC="/cgi-bin/Count.cgi?df=myfile.dat" align="absmiddle">

Replace myfile.dat with a name of your choice, unique to your page.

The above line produces the following count:

For more advanced things, like different digit styles, no borders, more colours, transparent backgrounds, rotated digits, clocks and dates, see this helpful page.

Frontpage Help

Chris Skardon, a Fastnet subscriber, has written a set of pages on the common problems you find when using Frontpage to produce web pages.
Thanks Chris!

Any questions, mail the webmaster