An easy way to comply with the new cookie law if your site is well designed

If your website is well structured, it shouldn't be a big problem update it to become compliant with the new cookie law - see [here].

I've completed the changes on three sites so far today - Well House Consultants, Well House Manor and Melksham Chamber of Commerce, and I have done considerable work on a fourth - First Great Western Coffee Shop, where we're having to do a change of forum agreement and make sure that people are informed about it, rather than just applying the changes to new visitors.

Let me tell you how I can do so many sites so quickly ;-)

1. On every page on the site, I have added extra code at the top:

  if ($_COOKIE["__utma"] or preg_match('/bot|crawl|spider/',$_SERVER[HTTP_USER_AGENT])) {

    $fill[cookalert] = "";

  } else {

    $fill[cookalert] = "<tr><td class='pageName'> • This site uses cookies - ".

      "see <a href=http://www.wellho.net/web2/cookies.php?which=chamber target=xss>".

      "[here]<a> for details.<br> • If you proceed, we will take that as ".

      "your consent to accept cookies<hr><td><tr>";

}

In other words, if there isn't a Google Analytics cookie present, and the browser is not an automata, we need to ask the user. We do not want to ask spiders and crawlers, as we don't want to damage our search engine placement by adding in cookie text.

2. That text is displayed within the template:

  <table border="0" cellspacing="0" cellpadding="0">

  %cookalert%

and

3. Providing the information in the extra page at http://www.wellho.net/web2/cookies.php?which=chamber (this is the longest bit)

Since our site's well designed and uses common header scripts and templates, I haven't really had to change every page - just a single teplate and header file on each site. But if you've got a site that's not well structured, there could be an awful lot of work involved.

Here's the different home page on our training site displayed to a brand new visitor and a vistor who already has cookies set:

Here's the different home page on our hotel site displayed to a brand new visitor and a vistor who already has cookies set:

Here's the different home page on the Chamber of Commerce site displayed to a brand new visitor and a vistor who already has cookies set:

The "further information" pages are PHP scripted too (taking care to avoid any more cookies in the process) - the important thing is for them to be complete and understandable - link to them ... Chamber of Commerce, First Great Western Coffee Shop, Well House Consultants and Well House Manor.
(written 2012-06-02) 23b6

Associated topics are indexed under

A213 - Web Application Deployment - Commercial and Legal Aspects
  [3746] Google Analytics and the new UK Cookie law - (2012-06-02)
  [3745] Legal change - You need to obtain user consent if you use cookies on your website - (2012-06-01)
  [3168] Web Sites - Subject to Advertising Standards from 1st March - check your sites - (2011-02-13)
  [3104] Catering in Syracuse, the Saigon Cafe, stolen images and Christmas - (2010-12-25)
  [3016] The legal considerations of your web presence - revisited - (2010-10-26)
  [2686] Freedom of Information - consideration for web site designers - (2010-03-20)
  [2592] Re-using our pictures - (2010-01-21)
  [2252] Leaping dog, Leaping horse, copyright of old masters - (2009-06-20)
  [2140] Beware - giving copyright away when you upload a picture - Dogs Trust - (2009-04-25)
  [1937] Getting hold of the wrong end of the stick - (2008-12-12)
  [1840] Validating Credit Card Numbers - (2008-10-14)
  [1747] Who is watching you? - (2008-08-10)
  [1506] Ongoing Image Copyright Issues, PHP and MySQL solutions - (2008-01-14)
  [1486] Does anyone understand Lithuanian? - (2007-12-27)
  [1485] Copyright and theft of images, bandwidth and members. - (2007-12-26)
  [1431] Getting the community on line - some basics - (2007-11-13)
  [1054] UK legal requirements for your commercial web site - (2007-01-27)
  [994] Training on Cascading Style Sheets - (2006-12-17)
  [876] Making pages clearer - easy Disability Discrimination Act Compliance - (2006-09-23)
  [795] Remember a site's non-technical issues too - (2006-07-07)
  [759] Watch your Google profile - (2006-06-13)
  [746] Domain Listing Center and Domain Registry of America - (2006-06-06)
  [532] Copyright - how much can I legally copy? - (2005-12-17)
  [322] More maps - (2005-05-23)
  [320] Ordnance Survey - using a 'Get a map' - (2005-05-22)
  [288] Colour blindness for web developers - (2005-04-22)
  [259] Responding to spam - (2005-03-27)
  [142] Colour for access - (2004-12-06)

H117 - Security in PHP
  [3813] Injection Attacks - PHP, SQL, HTML, Javascript - and how to neutralise them - (2012-07-22)
  [3698] How to stop forms on other sites submitting to your scripts - (2012-04-15)
  [3210] Catchable fatal error in PHP ... How to catch, and alternative solutions such as JSON - (2011-03-22)
  [2939] Protecting your images from use out of context - (2010-08-29)
  [2688] Security considerations in programming - what do we teach? - (2010-03-22)
  [2628] An example of an injection attack using Javascript - (2010-02-08)
  [2025] Injection Attack if register_globals in on - PHP - (2009-02-04)
  [1779] Injection Attacks - avoiding them in your PHP - (2008-08-31)
  [1694] Defensive coding techniques in PHP? - (2008-07-02)
  [1679] PHP - Sanitised application principles for security and useability - (2008-06-16)
  [1542] Are nasty programs looking for security holes on your server? - (2008-02-17)
  [1482] A story about benchmarking PHP - (2007-12-23)
  [1396] Using PHP to upload images / Store on MySQL database - security questions - (2007-10-19)
  [1387] Error logging to file not browser in PHP - (2007-10-11)
  [1323] Easy handling of errors in PHP - (2007-08-27)
  [1086] Injection attacks - safeguard your PHP scripts - (2007-02-20)
  [1052] Learning to write secure, maintainable PHP - (2007-01-25)
  [947] What is an SQL injection attack? - (2006-11-27)
  [920] A lion in a cage - PHP - (2006-11-10)
  [426] Robust checking of data entered by users - (2005-08-27)
  [345] Spotting a denial of service attack - (2005-06-12)

H304 - PHP - DDA, Style and image handling
  [2917] Upload Image, Store in database, redisplay in browser. PHP and MySQL - (2010-08-12)
  [2715] Uploading an image, document or pdf via a browser (php) - (2010-04-10)
  [2539] Changing Images - (2009-12-17)
  [2343] World Flags in your PHP pages - (2009-08-10)
  [2031] Choosing from an image with an image map - (2009-02-08)
  [806] Check your user is human. Have him retype a word in a graphic - (2006-07-17)

556d

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An easy way to comply with the new cookie law if your site is well designed
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This is a page archived from The Horse's Mouth at http://www.wellho.net/horse/ - the diary and writings of Graham Ellis. Every attempt was made to provide current information at the time the page was written, but things do move forward in our business - new software releases, price changes, new techniques. Please check back via our main site for current courses, prices, versions, etc - any mention of a price in "The Horse's Mouth" cannot be taken as an offer to supply at that price.

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