Goodies to Go! Newsletter #323

Q & A Goodies

Questions are taken from submissions to our Community Mentors. You can ask a Mentor a question by going to

http://www.htmlgoodies.com/mentors.

Q. I have a domain name that I keep my website posted at. But I also use
folders on my site that I do not link to from anywhere in my site. These are
just folders for me that I can create pages of reference material that I can
look up on the go. I would like to be able to give the address for these pages
to certain people but for the most part want to keep them private. Is there any
way that I can keep them from showing up in search engines, or some code that
would render them invisible to search bots. I don’t want to password protect the
pages I just want to make it harder for people to stumble onto them without
knowing the link.

A. You can tell the search engine robots which folders should and should
not be indexed by them. It is called The Robots Exclusion Protocol. When a robot
visits a web page it first looks for a file named ROBOTS.TXT. This file contain
the information about which parts of the site should nojt be visited by the
robot.

The Robots META tag lets you tell the robots if a document should be indexed or
not:
<META NAME="ROBOTS" CONTENT="NOINDEX, NOFOLLOW">
Only a few robots support this way.
HTML Author’s Guide to the Robots META tag:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/meta-user.html
The Web Robots Pages:

http://www.robotstxt.org/wc/robots.html

Q. I am trying to find a way to post my students’ grades to my webpage,
while insuring individual privacy. I have learned from the tutorials how to
include a password to keep the grades private. As far as I can tell, I should be
able to make an individual web page for each student and have the password link
to that page, showing them their grades. I have 70 students and do not look
forward to editing 70 pages each time I have to update grades. Is it possible to
store the grade information in one place and have each individual page find and
display the info for the appropriate student?

A. You may have already been told that using JavaScript and HTML alone is
not a very secure method of protecting HTML documents from being seen by others.
I would recommend that you investigate using a Server Side language such as Perl
or PHP. You can use both to access a flat file or file stored in a database such
as MYSQL and then build your HTML document with the students grades. I know it’s
not the answer you were looking for, but with javascript you can not read files
or write to files. You would have to store the students data in a JavaScript
array and then build the pages from that which would compromise your data.

Q. Used this bit of code:
var num=1
img1 = new Image ()
img1.src =
img2 = new Image ()

img2.src = "images/noahnick.jpg"
img3 = new Image ()
img3.src = "images/kevinnick.jpg"
img4 = new Image ()
img4.src = "images/mikekevin.jpg"
img5 = new Image ()
img5.src = "images/noahkevin2.jpg"

function slideshowUp()
{
num=num+1
if (num==6)
{num=1}
document.mypic.src=eval("img"+num+".src")
}

function slideshowBack()
{
num=num-1
if (num==0)
{num=5}
document.mypic.src=eval("img"+num+".src")
}

slide show opens – goes thru each image, after the last slide it looks
for an image that isn’t there instead of looping to image #1. Same
problem in reverse Any suggestions?

A. Try setting the initial value of the variable num to zero instead of
1. In your function you add 1 to it as the first step. Also in your function
slideshowUp when num has a value of 6 set it to zero instead of 1. In your
function slideshowBack try setting num to a value of
6 when it reaches 0 so that when you subtract 1 again it will be set to 5.

Q. I have a song loading on the first page of the website. I would like
that song to continue playing throughout the website with the ability to be
turned off at any time. Could you please tell me how to load it so it doesn’t
start over with the selection of any page link?

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