Tuesday, March 31, 2009

When One Needs to Hide Things in Plain Sight on the WWW

Let's say that a web page needs to show content according to various local sensibilities and that it's hosted by a 3rd party that does not provide server-side scripting. What to do?

It's simple! Javascript+DOM+CSS come to the rescue: simply have a <div> with style="display:none". Store your content there in a plain/text scrambled form.

Then load a JavaScript script from a server that you control as the output of a server-side script.

Decide in your server-side script whether you wish to authorize the user based on the $REMOTE_ADDR to view the content and spit out either the decrypting JavaScript code or some dummy code.

Simple, eh?

The negative side-effect is that the search engines won't index your content. The positive side-effect is that the search engines won't index you content (maybe you don't like other people to use your content for their own purposes, e.g. keywordspy·com) and spammers won't be able to grab e-mail addresses from your pages ;)

-ulianov