Installing a poll ... ASP? CGI? So confused!
Still battling away with learning everything all at once ... and a bit lost!
I'm wanting to put a basic poll onto a site. I want to control how it looks as much as possible so that it fits seamlessly into the site. I've managed to find some free scripts which appear to match my criteria, both in ASP and CGI. Problem is, I'm really not sure what I can and can't use and how to go about implementing everything. Not even sure how to test them!
Our site is hosted on a shared NT server. Details of our hosting package are basically as follows:
Support for Microsoft FrontPage Extensions
Ability to run your own CGI-scripts
Support for Active Server Pages (.asp files),
Microsoft Access Database (via ASP, Cold Fusion or IDC)
Private FTP for uploading site
Anonymous FTP
Support for Allaire Cold Fusion
NT version of Perl
The CGI poll script I've found seems ideal, however, upon reading the installation instructions I'm totally baffled as to how to go about it (talk of binary and ASCII, setting permissions ... eek!). And my understanding of everything I read about CGI generally seems to indicate that I should be using Apache (and I assume a Unix server??) and telnetting the information to the site rather than just using FTP. The ASP one I'm looking at doesn't seem as suitable and is also rather confusing me ...
Can anyone explain to me in brief what this all means and if uploading CGI is really all that complicated? Given that we're on an NT server should I be trying to stick with using ASP instead of CGI, even though our hosts support the latter?
Apologies if I'm not making much sense here ... but any information would be most helpful!
Bug
Mark Hensler posted this at 06:31 — 17th December 2001.
He has: 4,048 posts
Joined: Aug 2000
I would stick with ASP for NT servers. CGI is generally written with unix/linux in mind, though they can be written to be compatable with both.
With CGI scripts, you just need to upload via FTP in ACSII mode. There should be a simple setting on your FTP program to set the transfer mode. Once the files are on the server, you will most likey need shell access (via telnet or SSH) to set the permissions. The permissions set which files are executable, and which can be written to (as well as by who).
Hope that helps,
Mark Hensler
If there is no answer on Google, then there is no question.
Peter J. Boettcher posted this at 13:43 — 17th December 2001.
They have: 812 posts
Joined: Feb 2000
I would try to stick with ASP if you're on an NT machine. It will perform better and will be easier to integrate into your page. There's a sample poll in asp here: http://www.asp101.com/samples/polls.asp
PJ | Are we there yet?
pjboettcher.com
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