If you wish to instal software, for example the tools mentioned in the Vendors section, then a knowledge of CGI is very useful.
So what is CGI and what can it do ?
Almost anything you can think of at a web site - see the article below.
Here is an Ebook for beginners
The Absolute Beginners Guide to CGI
[Click here for Review]
You can also see the top selling programming books at ClickBank by clicking here
Without CGI, there would be no contact forms on web sites, no live surveys, no shopping carts, no search engines. Web sites would be static things that provide information and pretty pictures but offer no interaction.
Imagine this: Someone in Germany can surf to your web site (which might be located on a computer at a hosting company in Ontario, Canada) and do a quiz on one of your pages in exchange for a discount to your membership site.
The credit card purchase might go through a payment gateway on an internet server located in Chicago, USA. After the customer's credit card is approved, the customer fills in a form on your membership site's domain (which might be at a different hosting company, anywhere in the world) with preferred username, password, and other information -- and gains instant access as a member.
The quiz results, the customer's contact information, the discount earned, the purchase particulars, and the new member's username and other information are automatically emailed to your mailbox at your ISP, which may be in the city of Sydney, Australia.
All of that activity takes place in your absence while you're enjoying a bite of dessert after a particularly satisfying meal.
A few minutes later, you download your email and say, "Oh, good. Another sale." And you use the forum in your membership area to personally welcome the new member.
Without CGI, that magical scenario simply wouldn't happen.
More than CGI is involved, of course. Without the magic of the Internet itself, CGI would be useless.
And, yes, other technologies can do things CGI can do. They tend to specialize. Some do their job quite well. But CGI was first, it is still the best in its class, and it remains the most popular. It is a proven technology that works with all browsers and requires no plug-ins.
CGI is a method of receiving information provided by site visitors through their browsers. It's instant. (Well, it may take a moment or two to process the data.) CGI is also a method of sending information to visitors, again via their browsers. Information is received and responded to automatically. It's two-way communication. It's live. No webmaster intervention is required.
CGI cooperates well with other technologies, too. For example, our content syndication programs at the Master Series (Master Syndicator and Master Syndication Gateway I) use CGI to receive content and prepare it for syndication.
Then, JavaScript is used to deliver the content to remote syndication sites.
The webmasters of your remote syndication sites only need to paste a couple lines of JavaScript into one web page, at the spot where they want your content to show up. That's all they have to do; ever. (Well, they'll need to pay you every once in a while, if you charge for your content.)
When you put new content into the special form on your site and click the submit button, all remote syndication sites with the special JavaScript code on their pages are updated instantly and automatically.
Pure magic!
With CGI, you can have
Take a database-driven site, for example. Every page your visitor views is freshly generated, live on-the-spot, from your databases -products, prices, contact information, articles, bulletin board threads, everything. When you want to update information, you do it with a form in your browser.
The moment you click the submit button, the new information is already available to your visitors.
Yes, just like magic!
With CGI, you can...
You get the idea. Works like magic!
Will Bontrager
Copyright 2001 Bontrager Connection, LLC
WillMaster Possibilities