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Advertising Banner Manager

Everyone is familiar with advertising banners that appear on many web pages. In fact, there's probably one on top of this page. An interesting (or annoying) aspect of advertising is the need to display different ads and then track who clicks on them. This week's article will present two small Perl scripts that will let you add dynamic content to your web site. Although I'll mention advertising here, there are other ways to use these scripts. The structure used in this ad manager allows for flexibility and easy customization.

The manager works in two separate parts. The first script, picker.pl will select a random ad and insert it into an .html file when a user asks for it. To do this, you'll need to enable Server-Side Includes (SSI) in your site's web server. To use the ad manager script picker.pl, put the code like the following into an .html file where you want an ad to appear:

 <!--#exec cmd="/home/web/bin/picker.pl"-->

<a href="/cgi-bin/clicker.pl?bill">
 <img src="/adimages/bill.gif" 
   alt="Here comes Bill!" border=2><br>
  Click above on Bill
</a>

Then, the user will see something like the following:

Click above on Bill

Notice that the code above links to clicker.pl stored in the cgi-bin directory. This is the second part of the ad manager. This CGI script keeps track of who (which IP address) clicks on the link and then promptly redirects the user to the real destination URL.

Banner Directories

-rw-rw-rw-   1 web    71 May 12 23:00 click.log
-rw-rw-rw-   1 web    39 May 12 23:00 impression.log
-rw-r--r--   1 web   225 May 12 23:00 include.html
-rw-r--r--   1 web    26 May 12 23:00 redirect.txt

  chmod 0666 click.log impression.log

• click.log - records the time and IP address of every user who clicks on this banner advertisement.
• impression.log - records time and IP address of every user who sees the banner.
• include.html - the HTML code that is included in the .html file. This file allows you to generate fancy advertisements, including ones that combine text, images, forms and JavaScript.
• redirect.txt - contains the new URL where the user should be redirected after clicking on the ad.

Banner Software

• adman.tar - complete manager in TAR archive format, best for Unix
• adman.zip - complete manager in ZIP archive format, for those without access to tar.

adman/               - main directory with PERL scripts
adman/adimages/      - where images for ads are stored
adman/ads/           - where the ads are stored
adman/ads/bill/      - sample advertisement #1
adman/ads/burn/      -   "          "       #2
adman/ads/different/ -   "          "       #3
adman/ads/thecar/    -   "          "       #4

   http://yourserver/adimages/

Now, edit clicker.pl and picker.pl to change the value for $ADHOME:

   $ADHOME="/path/ads";

Finally, find an .html file and add a Server-Side Include (SSI) to run the picker.pl script:

 <!--#exec cmd="/path/picker.pl"-->

To create a new advertisement, you can follow these steps, which are presented in the form of a shell script named mkad:

Usage: mkad  new_ad_name

#!/bin/sh
# change the following path
cd /path/ads
mkdir $1
cd $1
touch click.log impression.log
chmod 0666 click.log impression.log
echo <<EOT > include.html

<a href="/cgi-bin/picker.pl?$1">Click Me!
EOT
echo "http://redirect-url-here" > redirect.txt

This is only the tip of the iceberg. Take a look at the sample ads included in the distribution. Then, after acquiring advertisers, you'll want to tell them how their ads are performing. In the future, I'll present some utilities to analyze the log files and generate real-time updates.

Server-Side Includes (SSI)

• The Apache mod_include documentation
• Using Server Side Includes
• Server-Side-Includes Tutorial

Author: Doug Steinwand
Date: [05/19/98]

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