Oh my ****ing god. HORRENDOUS.

Basically, I'm required for a college class to do a survey for a sociology essay. I had this somewhat pipe-dreamish idea of doing this online by way of HTML form that would be filled out and emailed to me, which ought not be difficult until you get into the whole CGI ****.

I'm trying to do this from my mac, i.e. I've enabled 'personal web sharing' and my mac, which has Apache installed for its web serving function, is going to serve the pages and ****. In order to test out this idea, I found some free code from one site (a HTML page with a form on it, and an apparently "all-purpose" CGI file to process it) to try it out. Made a couple of modifications to the HTML to make it specific to my setup, and dumped them into my "server" and all looked good.

Except Apache's default configuration doesn't allow CGI. It has the capabilities, but it's not set that way as default. This means the HTML form loads fine, but when it's submitted and tries to run the CGI, I get this message:

I've been through the Apache manual and made changes to the httpd.conf file to allow this. I've also been to a number of other websites and tried their advice, which recommend various things but mostly the same as the Apache manual.

So I'll try to explain my setup.

**** gets served from this directory Aenima/Users/jayne/Sites/ and are accessed by http://{my IP address}/~jayne/

The HTML form is called quiz.html and is in the directory I mentioned earlier, so Aenima/Users/jayne/Sites/quiz.html. It accessed at http://{my IP address}/~jayne/quiz.html

The opening form tag in quiz.html is this:

The CGI file is called index.cgi and lives in Aenima/Users/jayne/sites/cgi-bin/. When the HTML form is submitted, it's shooting for http://{my IP address}/~jayne/cgi-bin/index.cgi

And that's when I get the 405 error.

I enabled CGI in the httpd.conf file for the main directory (Users/*/Sites/) and I'm not sure if this just applies to subdirectories or if this would actually need to be done for Users/*/Sites/cgi-bin/, or some other directory.

So if anyone knows a bit about this and can see anything fundamentally wrong above, pls tell me what it is b/c I'm just not getting it. This is probably a good time to mention I'm an absolute noob at all of this, and I've spent about 3 hours getting to this point. I think the HTML form and CGI should be fine, since they've been lifted from elsewhere, so I'm thinking it's more of a server configuration problem.

I might just give up and do a paper survey at this rate.

It's been years since I've done CGI type stuff, but I'm sure it's possible to just have the form all on a HTML page that just knocks up the email for you in a form you can parse back, without having to go through all this malarkey hosting it yourself? Could need some scripting glue but it seems easier. Also, most ISPs that give you free hosting also have a basic cgi-bin repository that'll have stock code for surveys, etc. though it may need enabling.

...or just a text email laid out in a form that's easy for them to reply to specific sections & make multiple choice ticks clear?

How many people will this survey be going to? How in-depth are the answers?

Cheers for your thoughts, that stuff could well make it a lot easier on me if I at least give up the idea of hosting it myself, which was mostly me being a cheap bastard. I think I might look into the ISP's hosting banter and see if mine is giving me anything for free.

I'm shooting for at least 50 folks for this survey, which was why I felt it might be easier to do online since I can punt it around all the various websites I visit and probably get a decent amount of folks taking the 5 mins to do it, as well as getting RL people to do it (which I might still do on paper).

At least I've got some more thoughts on the go. Ta.

If you want me to write a quick PHP script to host on my site I'd happily do it tomorrow. Im going to bed now tho but PM if you want the quiz.html file uploaded to the site.

• APO Networks

Tis alright, my bf tells me that the web sharing function I was trying to use only works as an intranet thing so this whole thread was pretty much nonsense from the word go.

Paper surveys it is, I haven't really got time to faff about any longer, for what it's going to be worth.