Prevent Theft

It is probably just a matter of time before you find somebody copying content from your web site.

In most cases it is not that big of a deal and you can get them stopped pretty easily.

There are some instances however where you are trying to protect some content on your site. For example, I recently launched a new site at www.marketingyourdvd.com

Included in this site are some online applications that I have created for the members of that site. One is an eBay instant sales page creator and there are also spreadsheet for DVD production cost analysis.

In both cases, I spent some time putting this information together and I don't want anyone simply ripping off the source code from my site to copy it.

I took steps to protect my source code from blatant theft.

HTML Encryption

There are few different ways to protect html source code. They work by scrambling up the content and then creating javascript which decodes the source code for the browser.

I don't bother scrambling all of the html on the page, only parts of it which would be required to run the application on the web page. Even if that code did happened to be copied, it has my site name and copyright notices all over.

There is a free way to do it by using the javascript encryptor at Jimworld

You copy and paste a section of your html code into the box and then press encrypt:

Then save the encrypted text into a text file. Call it script.js for example and load it to your web site in the same directory the web page exists.

Then on the page where the code needs to be, place this code:

When the web page is loading it will get to this tag which tells the web page to access the scrambled text from your site. The site is unscrambled and displayed properly.

Word Of Warning

You don't want to do this for your entire web page. There are two problems by doing that:

• the search engines won't be able to read what ever you encrypted
• the javascript slows down the loading of the page a little bit. If you keep the amount encrypted small, it won't be a big difference at all. Encrypt a lot and there will be a noticeable delay

This isn't a tool you will use all of the time, but when you want to prevent your work from being ripped off, it is a good one to have around.