Welcome to the MacNN Forums.

lothar56 · 09:22 AM

For my web design class, we have to make a survey in html, but no one can figure out how to get it to work well. From what I understand, mailto forms are worthless, so how do I get cgi to work?

here's the link:
survey

mzllr · Oct 9, 2003, 01:04 PM

your link doesn't work...

Weezer · Oct 9, 2003, 05:50 PM

thats really wierd, as I had my first part of a web survey due today for my web design class...

Scarpa · Oct 9, 2003, 06:22 PM

Originally posted by lothar56:
For my web design class, we have to make a survey in html, but no one can figure out how to get it to work well. From what I understand, mailto forms are worthless, so how do I get cgi to work?

Whew that's kind of a big topic there. Does your class provide any cgi scripts that will process a form for you? If you have access to a server that runs perl you can try and use a premade form processor script from the web, otherwise you need to learn to do it yourself. That is way beyond the scope of forum post, I'm afraid.

The high level view is that the form sends the input data back to the server, where something (php, asp, perl cgi script) parses that data and does something with it.

lothar56 · Oct 10, 2003, 09:24 AM

No, I'm given nothing to help. Our teacher doesn't know how to do it either. But are there sites that will host for me? I've read a bit about perl and cgi but I can't really figure out what I need to do.

philzilla · Oct 10, 2003, 09:39 AM

Originally posted by lothar56:
Our teacher doesn't know how to do it either.

simply outrageous! how s/he can use the title of "teacher" is quite beyond me. how are they supposed to grade your work, if they don't know anything about the work they're grading?

learn how to do it in your spare time, but refuse to do it in class.

Scarpa · Oct 10, 2003, 12:02 PM

Originally posted by lothar56:
No, I'm given nothing to help. Our teacher doesn't know how to do it either. But are there sites that will host for me? I've read a bit about perl and cgi but I can't really figure out what I need to do.

I'm feeling extra nice today (friday heh) so I'll point you in a good direction.

First, find a host. This is the hard part. Since (I'm assuming) you're in college ask your nerdiest friend where you can upload your webpage and a perl script. You probably have a user account with your school that you can do this on, I dunno.

Once you find a host, go download this form. It is a dead-simple perl script that requires ZERO configuration. All you need to do is get it running. Then you tell it what to do by adding a few hidden input tags in your form and then you're done. There's no perl knowledge required and if you can write and understand a survey form you will understand how to use the script.

varcos · Oct 10, 2003, 01:54 PM

Hello, do you have a powerbook or ibook with os X? if so, then you've got a full webserver right there. Just turn on web sharing and put your page and the already mentioned perl script on there. Voila.

Of course, you could also set up MySQL and PHP on your book and save all the poll results in a database. Then you could create graphs and such from the responses. But that may be a little overboard.

If you (or anyone else) are actually interested in that and you've got a week or so (because I can't help today) just drop a note here and I'll see if I can write something up that'll walk you through the above steps.

varcos

nica · Oct 10, 2003, 03:18 PM

This is what you need to do:

- Get out of the class (your teacher doesn't know $hit!)
- Tell other students to avoid that teacher
- Go to the Library and do some research using Google
- Read a few books on CGI

macvillage.net · Oct 10, 2003, 09:33 PM

Originally posted by Scarpa:
I'm feeling extra nice today (friday heh) so I'll point you in a good direction.

First, find a host. This is the hard part. Since (I'm assuming) you're in college ask your nerdiest friend where you can upload your webpage and a perl script. You probably have a user account with your school that you can do this on, I dunno.

Once you find a host, go download this form. It is a dead-simple perl script that requires ZERO configuration. All you need to do is get it running. Then you tell it what to do by adding a few hidden input tags in your form and then you're done. There's no perl knowledge required and if you can write and understand a survey form you will understand how to use the script.

Going to have trouble with perl on Geocities.

timmerk · Oct 11, 2003, 04:52 AM

CGI NOTHING!

start off with php. youll finish this project in 5 min after reading 20 min worth of any good php book.

Weezer · Oct 13, 2003, 06:13 PM

For what its worth, in my intro webdesign class, our big project is to make a web survey. to do this, we are learning php, and will be making a php program to analyze the inputs. Since they are probably similar courses, php is probably your best bet. However, my teacher actually teaches us...

lothar56 · Oct 15, 2003, 11:13 AM

We just sit around and pretend to work. It's quite a scam. We are supposed to be doing an online tutorial on frames, but I am pretty sure they are obsolete. I don't really see them in use anymore. I did get the survey to work by copy/pasting the source code from a classmate's site. Apparently the teacher found some way to get it to work when I wasn't paying attenetion.