A Site Structure Pattern from
Patterns for Personal Web Sites

Private Entrance

A Web site is by definition is a public space: anyone can visit. What do you do if you'd like part of your site to be private, only known to some people? For example, you may want to run a personal ad, but you might be embarrassed if your mother or friends ran across it.

You could use your server-based access restrictions to give a password to the private material. However, this is rather unfriendly, since it lets people know that your site contains material they can't access. If you want the material to remain private, it's better that most visitors don't know it exists.

Therefore, if you have material that you don't want to be public, make it available but don't link to it from your public pages.

Private entrances are by nature temporary. Sooner or later, your private entrance will become public, despite your best efforts to keep the URL secret. Secrets have a way of becoming known. Aside from the human problem, the URL of a private entrance can escape through means you can't anticipate. For example, an offsite link from a private page can reveal that page's existence through the HTTP Referer header. If the destination site posts logs publicly, then the private entrance's URL could be disclosed. There's little you can do about this, short of being prepared to move or rename the private entrance once its URL become public.

It's also important that the directory containing a private entrance have a Default Page, to avoid inadvertent disclosure of the private entrance's existence.

Cover Page and Secret Garden are structurally similar to a private entrance, but have different goals.



Last updated 17 June 2002
http://www.rdrop.com/~half/Creations/Writings/Web.patterns/private.entrance.html
All contents ©2002 Mark L. Irons