Can anyone recommend the following:
Something to password protect certain areas of my web site? I have photo albums, but I don’t want them to be publicly accessible.
A free “guestbook” feature for my site. No ads, and not remotely hosted. Just something really simple that I can have on my site for people to leave comments. I Googled the heck out of this but it seems like most stuff is “ad-supported.”
THANK YOU in advance!
How is your site hosted currently? These sound like things that a lot of hosting companies offer with the hosting contract–have you asked your host this question?
Assuming you have login access to your web server, you can password protect individual directories by placing .htaccess and .htpasswd files in the directory. Google ‘htaccess htpasswd’ to get examples and detailed configuration options. Basically, .htaccess specifies the type of authorization checking to do and points to the password file, while .htpasswd contains the encrypted password for each authorized user (generated using the htpasswd command, e.g. ‘htpasswd -c .htpasswd someuser’). You can specify any username you want in this file – they don’t have to match login names on the server.
Did you do a generic web search, or one based on the programming language your web server utilizes? There are plenty of free and low-cost Perl and PHP scripts that will do exactly as asked, with no ads.