DCN Web Tools: subscribe.pl

This page describes how to use subscribe.pl to allow visitors to your personal or organizational World Wide Web pages to subscribe to DCN mailing lists by using a fill-in form. This is advanced topic for DCN Web Authors. If this doesn't make sense to you, more basic information is available under About the DCN Web. subscribe.pl is a Perl script that allows you to incor porate access to a CGI script into your pages so that visitors can subscribe to a Davis Community Network mailing list without you having to know anything about CGI scripts. subscribe.pl can be referenced two ways: as a link, or from a feedback form you incorporate into your own pages.

Usage:

  • As a Link

    To reference subscribe.pl as a link, just place a link on your HTML pages to the URL:

    http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/cgi-bin/subscribe.pl?listname

    Where listname is the name of the list you want the user to be able to subscribe to (e.g., "dcn-announce"). An example of this usage might look like this:

    <A HREF="http://www.dcn.davis.ca.us/cgi-bin/subscribe.pl?dcn-announce"> Subscribe to dcn-announce! </A>

    This would appear to the page visitor as: Subscribe to dcn-announce!

  • From a Feedback Form

    To reference subscribe.pl from a feedback form, just incorporate the following feedback form in the HTML of your page:

    Subscribe to (your list here)

    Enter your E-mail Address:

    Do not try and use the above form, as it will not work. You need to copy the HTML code from the above section out of the source code for this page, and change (your list here), which occurs twice, to the name of the DCN maili ng list you want the form to work for. You can get at the source code by using the "View Source" function of your browser, if it has one, or by saving the HTML file to your disk and editing it. If this doesn't make any sense to you, try the ot her method (above) - it is easier.

subscribe.pl was written by Christian Sandvig. If you are interested, the source code is available.