Web Site File Location Questions - March 4, 2011

[E.D.G]

Web Site File Location Questions - Posted March 4, 2011

I am in the process of getting a bulletin board running on a BlueHost site. And some information is needed regarding where various files etc. should be stored and how they can be protected.

The following are the bulletin board files etc. Any of the names can be easily changed.

bbs.html – this is the Web page that site visitors will normally go to first

bbs.pl – this is the Perl language program that will run the bulletin board. The bbs.html Web page accepts text input. When the Submit button on the Web page is pressed the data are sent to the Web site and interpreted by the bbs.pl program. The program source code should probably be invisible to people visiting the bulletin board

password.txt – this is the file in which the password and user name information are stored. The bbs.pl program checks this file to make sure the person has posting permission. This file obviously needs to be invisible and inaccessible to people visiting the bulletin board

messages – this is a directory in which individual text messages submitted by people posting notes to the bulletin board will be stored. It should probably also be invisible to people visiting the board

I am familiar with files that direct robots away from certain areas of a Web site. Where should that type of file be stored on the BlueHost site? I don’t want robots to read the files in the messages directory

Comment: - I have the Xampp (enhanced Apache Web server emulation) program running on two of my Windows PCs using both XP and Vista. The program is well designed and fairly easy to use in my opinion. It took some doing, but I was able to determine how to get the bulletin board program running on both of my PCs and also the BlueHost site. And that makes it much easier to do development work on the bulletin board program. I can do the work on my PCs and then transfer the files to the BlueHost site. If anyone would like some information on that process then they can try contacting me.

[felgall]

Either move the directory outside of public_html

or if that's too much work then use the cpanel option to password protect the directory but don't set any passwords