Webmaster Tips

Cool and Easy NetCloak Tags

I just prepared a rather long piece on how to use NetCloak to make a "Smart Error Page" for your site, which will fix common mistakes, email you notification about problems with your site, and keep your bathroom sparkling clean.

Ok, it doesn't really do anything for your bathroom, I'm sorry to say.

Before we dive into that one, I want to let you know about some simple NetCloak additions you can make to your pages to display information dynamically. This one is specifically for those of you who are hosted on our servers (or another server that uses NetCloak).

The first of these is something I use on most of my site: a tag that shows the last update. To display the last time a particular page was modified, simply put

Last Updated: <INSERT_MODIFIED>

on your page. <INSERT_MODIFIED> looks at the last time the file was saved, and reports that on your web page.

Another that I like to use shows the web address of the page, so that if someone prints the page, they'll know how to get back to it. Put the following on your page:

<INSERT_HOST><INSERT_THISURL>

The first part, Insert_Host, puts your domain name in. The second part plugs in the rest of the path to the particular page.

Actually, I often string these two together:

<INSERT_HOST><INSERT_THISURL> Last Updated: <INSERT_MODIFIED>

which comes out something like:

http://www.greenbuilder.com/general/BuildingSources.html Last Updated on Tuesday, May 1, 2001

You can also insert the current time or date:

And you can "offset" the time to show it in a different time zone:

There are several additional parameters which allow inserting a single part of the date. These are:

For example, you could write:

Today is <INSERT_DATE DAYNAME>, the <INSERT_DATE DAYNUM> of <INSERT_DATE MonthName>, <INSERT_DATE YEAR>.

NetCloak also will generate a random number for you. By default (without a range specified), the value will be between 1 and 100. Here are a few examples:

Random number between 1 and 100: <INSERT_RANDOM>
Random number between 1 and 5: <INSERT_RANDOM 5>
Random number between 1 and 500: <INSERT_RANDOM 500>

Why would you want to use this? Well, one example I've used it on was a contest page for one of our clients. They wanted 1 winner of a free book in every 100 visitors, a discount for another 24 visitors, and the rest were invited back for another try tomorrow. (I also used some other NetCloak tricks to make sure that they couldn't just keep trying until they won, and still other NetCloak tools to display different information to each of the three categories - all at the same web address! We'll go into that one in more detail later...) I also use it to randomly deliver banner advertising - if I have 5 advertisers, I can name their banners "ad1.jpg" "ad2.jpg",...etc, and then deliver them using something like the following:

Each time the page is loaded, one of the banners is chosen at random. You can see this in action on the Sustainable Building Sourcebook (http://www.greenbuilder.com/sourcebook/)

Another command you can use will insert the URL of the last page visited into your document at the specified point. The URL will be exactly as reported by the browser, including server name and path and search arguments.

Here is an example:

Note that this command will not work if the browser does not report the last page the user visited. In general, the referrer will be reported when the user clicks on a hypertext link to access the page. However, if the user manually enters the URL, the browser may not send the referrer, since the page the user was on when they entered the URL doesn't actually reference the page being served.

Since REFERRER is commonly misspelled REFERER (including in early versions of the Internet specification for HTTP - what do you expect from a bunch of nerds?), NetCloak also supports that spelling for all REFERRER commands.

I hope these few simple tags will get your gears going about what might be possible on your site. If you want to really dive in, look up the NetCloak documentation, and/or join their tech support list. There's an amazing amount of cool stuff you can do.

And if you don't want to do it yourself, don't forget that we're always available for hire ;-)

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