• Probably the most important thing is proper spelling, capitalization, and grammar. It sounds simple but there are so many pages out there that don't follow this. No matter how good or timely your content is, no one will read it if it is not proper English. Watch your formatting as well.
• Watch your colors in your text. A lot of people have trouble seeing various colors and wacky color schemes may be very difficult to see on certain browsers. I'm probably going a little overboard in this regard in putting black on white but, really, will anybody care about the fancy colors of your text?
• What's your point? You need to make a basic decision of what "kind" of page it is. The most basic decision to make is whether it's dynamic or static. Are you doing rumors or results on a regular basis or do you want to be "the" place to find something?
  • If you are regularly updating your page, give people a reason to come back. Even if you write better TV reports than anyone else on the Web, if you only post your TV reports once in a while, or don't post them until three days after the broadcast, people are going to turn to sites that are more consistent. And, unless you have an inside line into the business, don't bother with a rumors page. Why would anyone go to your page just to see stuff you've copied from other sites?
  • If you are doing a special interest page, try to do something original. That's why I really like Chan & Charlie's Q&A Page. They're doing something that no one else is doing.
    I have no desire to look at another Undertaker page. They don't tell me anything I don't already know. I'd find a page about Brad Armstrong or the old USA Network TNT Show much more interesting because it has information I can't find anywhere else.
• Submit your site to a lot of search engines. If your page isn't on Google, Yahoo, etc., there's no way people can find it.
• Don't ask someone to post a link to your page unless you already have linked to their page. Your e-mail should politely request a link, and it should point out where on your page that they can find the link to their page. Sorry...your saying "I'll put a link up after you put a link up" don't fly when you're the one making the request. Not to sound arrogant, but chances are the link exchange is going to do more for you than it will for me, so don't attempt to hold the reciprocal link hostage.

1. Go to Matt's Script Archive and get the script for his random image displayer.
2. Customize the script as needed, and create the input file of varying HTML for it. Each possible piece of HTML will be separated by a line with "%%" on it.
3. FTP both those files over to your cgi-bin directory. They must both be FTPed as ASCII files or this will not work.
4. Log in to the UNIX box, and chmod the files to mode "755". It seems you must give permission for both 'read' and 'execute' on the script and the input file for this to work. Chances are, when you initially FTP the files, they are created with mode "744". The good news here is that once you change them to "755", even though you keep FTPing them over, it does not reset the mode to "744".
5. Put the "exec cgi" code in the calling page as per Matt's instructions. Note that any page that does an "exec cgi" will probably need to have a "shtml" suffix rather than "html" or "htm", which is probably what you have now. This is done so only pages with an "shtml" suffix incur the overhead to look for and parse the scripts. If the page you want to run this from is a directory's default page (like it was for me) and links all over the web are just pointing to the directory, you'll need to get the webmaster to change the default in that directory (e.g. change the default from "index.htm" to "index.shtml"). When you've done this, FTP this file over.

Reader Allen P. has also sent in a Java Script version for those of you who might be interested in that. You can find a working version of this on his page.

<script language="JavaScript">
 
var date = new Date();
var seconds = date.getSeconds();
// this script uses the seconds value to determine which line to show
if (seconds == 0) {
    document.write('Insert your own line of HTML code here.');
    }
else if (seconds == 1) {
    document.write('Insert your own line of HTML code here.');
    }
else if (seconds == 2) {
    document.write('Insert your own line of HTML code here.');
    }

Keep adding "else if . . . }" lines, with the seconds value increasing and stop at 60. When you finish that, add this tag:

</script>

• It significantly cuts down your time to download the pages. Remember, I started this back in the days when dial-up Internet connectivity was the norm. So, back then, this was more important to a larger percentage of our readership. Still, there are a few people out there with limited connectivity, most notably our men and women overseas who still enjoy DDT Digest and let me know they appreciate the fact that it comes up quickly.
• My ISP charges by amount of traffic on the site. In the sites heyday, we did upwards of 10G of traffic a month. It got so expensive that my ISP sent Harlem Heat over my house to turn me upside down and shake me until all the money fell out of my pockets. Thus, I'm giving you the important stuff up front (the updates). Starting in 2006, my ISP greatly increased my bandwidth allocation at no charge, so now you can feel free to sit and press the reload key all key.
• It's friendly to all browsers.
• I don't have time to learn Java right now.
• Style don't keep you coming back. Substance does.