MAGIC 8 BALL:

Emulation of popular toy from your childhood with KILLER GRAPHICS. Easy to install and will give hours of fun for people that visit your site.

System Requirements

• Perl 5

Preliminaries

• Determine the path to PERL 5 on your web server host.  Note that some web hosting companies run both PERL 4 and PERL 5.  Make ABSOLUTELY sure you are not setting this up under PERL 4.  Ask your administrator if you are not sure.

• If you need to review or learn the basics of CGI and Perl visit the tutorial

• Download the tarfile for this program and save it to your desktop.

• Unpack the tar archive on your desktop using a program that unpacks UNIX TAR ARCHIVES. If you don't have such a program then download WINZIP FREE from SHAREWARE.COM. 

• After you have unpacked the TAR archive you will have a collection of folders and files on your desktop.  Now you have to do some basic editing of each of these files (or at least some of them).  Use a text editor such as wordpad, notepad, BBEdit, simpletext, or teachtext to edit the files.  These are NOT WORD PROCESSOR DOCUMENTS they are just simple TEXT files so don't save them as word processor documents or save them with extentions such as .txt or they will NOT WORK.   Note that there may be a some files inside of folders which are "blank".   This is normal.

Preparing the CGI scripts

Define Path To PERL 5

The first step is to open up each and every file that has a .cgi extention and edit line number one of each script.  Each of the cgi scripts is written in perl 5. For your scripts to run they must know where perl 5 is installed on your web server. The path to perl 5 is defined to a cgi script in the first line of the file. In each of the cgi scripts the first line of code looks something like this:

#!/usr/bin/perl

If the path to perl 5 on your web server is different from /usr/bin/perl you must edit the first line of each cgi script to reflect the correct path. If the path to perl 5 is the same no changes are necessary. If you do not know the path to perl 5 ask the webmaster or system administrator at your server site.  

Configure the .cgi files

Pretty simple.  Open 8ball.cgi and edit these 2 variables

• $querypage = "index.html";   point to the location of the "ask question page" (RELATIVE PATH)

• $imagedir = "/demo/8ball/images";   point to the location of the images directory (RELATIVE PATH)

Chmod the files

• Chmod all the .cgi files to 755.  Chmod everything else to 666 or 777

Using The Program

• Create directory called 8ball.  Create directory inside that called images and upload index.html into /8ball and all the gifs into /8ball/images.  Upload the script 8ball.cgi into your cgi-bin or whatever.

ONLY $9.95 for this script PLUS all the other scripts. Total Package... $9.95