Recently, I found myself in an unlikely love quadrangle involving an Irish
lad, an ex-boyfriend, and an adorable physicist. A minor fiasco
involving the contents of my FAQ and the
aforementioned gents proved that content not only isn't dead, but alive,
well, and messing up my life. But it also caused me to rethink my
disclosure policies. How do I feed my fans and stalkers the dynamic content
they've come to depend on without losing my favorite pair of brown
eyeballs? À la The Graduate, it comes down to one word: password.
Now if you want to set up a small, offshore money-laundering scheme or start your own country just to get a top-level domain with your initials, then you are probably going to need to implement some real security measures. But for the rest of us who just want to have nice, normal, fulfilling love lives, a simple password scheme can really deliver, if you know what I mean.
I realized that there are three kinds of Web surfers in this world: men I'd like to get to know better, the rest of the world, and my
mom. Instead of jeopardizing my love life by baring my soul (and coffee
intake) in a single daily FAQ, I needed to have three separate FAQs with
appropriately varying content all hiding behind a single
password-querying link.
If you've never worked with JavaScript before, I strongly recommend that you
check out Thau's basic
JavaScript tutorial. That's what I did. And here's how I went
about password-protecting my love life.
First I rewrote the HREF link for my FAQ so that it calls a JavaScript
function to ask users for a password and direct them to different FAQs
based on their responses.
So instead of plain vanilla HTML,
<a href="./faq.html">
Read the Amazing Heidi FAQ
</a>
I associated a JavaScript function with the link:
<a href="./faq.html" onClick="whereTo();return false">
Read the Amazing Heidi FAQ
</a>
By leaving in the original FAQ URL, I made sure users without JavaScript
will have an active link. Javascript-capable browsers will
evaluate the onClick first, and as long as you include the return false
at the end, you'll be golden. So all the Luddites will go straight to the
default FAQ without having to sharpen their pencils, while JavaScript users
will be sent wherever the whereTo() function knows to send them. I'd better show you how I wrote that script, too.
If you don't already know that the following JavaScript is customarily
placed between the </title> and the </head> tags, you really
should ask
yourself, Why am I resisting the urge to check out Thau's
tutorial?
<script language="JavaScript">
<!-- hide script
function whereTo()
{
var magic_word = prompt("What is the magic word?","Pretty
Please?");
if(magic_word == "password")
{window.location = "./boy_faq.html";}
else if (magic_word
== "mom")
{window.location = "./mom_faq.html";}
else
{window.location = "./faq.html";}
}
//end hiding script -->
</script>
The above function will prompt the user for a password. The password is
then compared to the predefined options contained in your standard
if-then-else script. When the user enters the password "mom," that user is presumably my mom and will therefore be sent off to the
mom_faq.html document. Similarly, if the user types in the
difficult-for-even-a-boy-to-forget password "password," he or she will be
carefully directed to a tame version of my FAQ (boy_faq.html), where
I would never ever reveal any potentially threatening emotions or
needs. Enter any other password whatsoever, and the script assumes
there are no special handling needs and takes you to the default all-access
FAQ.
The above password scheme can be used to direct users to any number of
fixed pages or folders. In some sense, this is not very different from
simply handing out different URLs. However, one advantage of the password setup
above is that you could have many password-isolated areas
accessible from a single homepage, which makes for easier bookmarking and
increased user friendliness. If you do plan to lock up sections of your
Web site behind passwords, remember that you should have some kind of
default page with a mailto link to accommodate random passers-by.
Again, what's to stop these people from viewing the source code and filching the passwords to see where they lead? The same thing that
keeps people from opening medicine cabinets: nothing but a sense of
decorum. Like I said, these methods are not meant to be used for
securing your site absolutely; they are simply tools for tighter organization, content
control, and of course, a better dating life.
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