By now you might have heard the widely-covered story of Judge Kozinski's web site scandal.

To summarize, a well-regarded judge of the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals was found, in the midst of presiding over an obscenity trial, to have posted obscene materials on his personal web site. The resulting conflict of interest forced him to declare a mistrial and he is now under investigation by a panel of federal judges.

Whoops.

The first thing that comes to mind when you hear this story is, "What an idiot! How could such a smart guy could do something so dumb?", Then you might start searching for his site, or perhaps you just move on to the sports page and get on with your life.

But if you have your own web site you should probably pay attention to this story and ask yourself, "How can I avoid this type of shame and humiliation?"

The easy answer is, "Don't post anything that you don't want the whole world to see." This is a surefire solution but it doesn't help you when you want to post confidential materials for review or testing purposes.

So let's look at a what Judge Kozinski should have done to cover his arse.

Create an Index File

When you create a new web directory (sometimes called a "folder" because directories appear as folders in most file management applications) its contents, by default, are exposed to the world. If a browser is pointed to the directory, it looks for a file named "index". If there is no index file, the browser displays something like this.

This is how Judge Kozinski set up his "stuff" directory and, as you can see, it's no way for a public official to distribute questionable materials.

Hizzoner probably thought, "No one will see this unless I give them the address." But he underestimated the search engines. He used a robots.txt that should have kept them away from his low comedy collection but Yahoo!, ever vigilant, indexed it anyway.

Had Kozinski simply created an "index" file that looked something like this, he probably could have avoided scandal, scrutiny and what is bound to be a hellacious peer review. An index page without any links is a dead end and the robots.txt file would probably discourage the search engines from prying any deeper. Probably, but not necessarily. To further protect his reputation, the would-be Supreme Court nominee should have gone a step further.

Password Protect a Directory

Creating an index file is good standard practice and provides a small measure of security. But if you put something truly confidential on the web, password protect the directory.

Password protection keeps out both unwanted visitors and search engine robots.

There are several ways to password protect a web page. One common method is to set up an .htaccess file. But if you're ready for that, you probably stopped reading this article a while ago.

To password protect a directory, sign in to your site's control panel and use the password protection tool. It's usually that easy.

There are many other ways to safeguard your web site. If you want to know more and aren't afraid of drowning in acronyms, here's a good launching point for learning more. But you're just another aspiring Supreme Court Justice who wants to have a little fun, an index file and password protection should keep you out of trouble.