Some features we offer

• Mailing list WWW gateway. If you run a mailing list on bi.org (or indeed, anywhere), you can use this PHP script to give easy 'subscribe'/'unsubscribe' access from HTML pages. See euro-bi list for an example of how to use this.

• ht://Dig search engine. We index all the pages on the server on a weekly basis, and provide access via an HTML page. See Search engine for an example of how to use this. If you want a search form/page that will search just your own pages, it's a very simple configuration change. Ask the WebMaster for information on how to do this.

• Password controlled access to some pages. You can limit access to some of your pages with user passwords, using a .htaccess in the directory that you want to protect. This is entirely controlled by you. Some details on how to set this up can be found at Apache Week: Using User Authentication. You may need to ask the WebMaster for help in setting up the files.

• Analog WWW statistics package let you gather details about who hits your pages, how often, etc. This is run weekly, and you can have your own customised stats page just containing hits to your pages if you ask nicely. See BCN stats for an example.

• Weblint HTML syntax and style checker. We run this weekly on every page on the server, and is very useful for finding mistakes in your pages: sometimes there are errors that you can't see with the web browser you use, but other people reading your pages will see them.

• Big Brother WWW link checker. We run this weekly on every page on the server, and it reports any broken internal or external links. With many thousands of links all over our server, this is very useful for keeping up to date with the WWW which is of course constantly changing.

• Web page spelling checker. We run this weekly on every page on the server, to help you locate and fix typo's and common spelling mistakes in your pages.

• Image checker. We run this weekly on every GIF and JPEG on the server, to help you locate inefficiently compressed image files on your pages.

• Multi-lingual web pages to help provide pages in more than one language - auto selection of the best language for a visitor and computer-translation of web pages using BabelFish.

• PHP/FI server side scripting. This fantastic scripting language lets you have standard header/footer functions, database access to page counters, etc. without the need for any weighty cgi-bin scripts, because PHP runs as a module built directly into the Apache server. Some simple examples are detailed below.

  Hits counter using PHP scripting. To add a counter to your own HTML, just embed the following PHP script;

     <?include "c1.phtml"; counter(5);?>

  This example counter has been viewed times.

  Last modified time string can be added to pages, and uses the time/date stamp of that HTML file, rather than relying on you to update the date string by hand each time you modify the page. Try adding the following PHP command;

     <?echo Date("H:i d/M/y", getLastMod());?>

  Which was last modified at .

  There are obviously much more impressive things you can do with PHP, but the above short examples show how easy it is to get started with it. See the PHP pages for full documentation.

  Note! That because these are server-side scripts, you can't test them out locally before uploading them to the server (which is what you might normally do). The scripts will just appear as normal text, or not appear at all if you load the pages off local disc. Also, don't edit the pages using "View source" or similar - that will give you the HTML output by the PHP script, not the PHP itself. To edit a page that uses PHP, you must first download it off the server using FTP.

  Source code & documentation for many of the scripts we use at this site is now available from PHP scripts.

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