Documentation
OPT IN PRO


System Requirements

  • Customizable to work with all operating systems
  • Customizable to work with all web servers
  • Perl 5
  • Sendmail
  • Mysql

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.
  • 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

configure.cgi

This file pretty much runs the whole show.  If you screw this one up don't count on anything working properly.   In other words, make sure you take the time to do this step CORRECTLY.  Ask your administrator if you need to.  Below are the variables used in ALL of the other cgi scripts.  All of the other cgi programs USE configure.cgi to figure out where certain things are.

  • $rate is how much you will pay per valid email address, for example 0.5 is 50 cents.
  • $sysadmin is your email address
  • $adminuser is your login for check system stats
  • $adminpass is your password
  • $db is the name of your mysql database
  • $domain is the hostname o your mysql database
  • $dbuser is the username for mysql
  • $dbpass is the password for mysql

Create MYSQL database

  • Create MYSQL database and upload the optinpro.sql file
  • Edit the optinpro.sql file where you see the area to add your newsletter names (pretty obvious).  You can add as many as you want.

Upload Your Edited CGI and Database Files

  • Upload all of the cgi files (.cgi) into a directory you create called "optinpro" inside your cgi-bin.  Chmod all cgi files to 755
  • Make a directory inside of your webspace called optinpro to upload the html files used for the cgi script.  Make sure they point to the /cgi-bin/optinpro directory

Upload The Edited HTML Files

  • Make a directory inside of your webspace called harvester and 2 directories inside of this called webmasters and admin
  • Modify the form action tags of the admin (index.html) page and the webmasters (index.html) page and upload these into their respective directories.
  • Create a demo of the webmasters "subscription" page as seen here (register.html)