You can also read the article that describes how this is implemented.

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Jun 24 2001 ____________________________________________________________               C o v e r Y o u r A S P . c o m              Welcome to the latest newsletter!                  http://CoverYourASP.com/ ____________________________________________________________ After four weeks with a 31k dial-up connection ISP's are now throwing their services upon me. My DSL application failed for unspecified reasons, but now miraculously I received a letter offering it to me: "it's now available in your area". But after a lot of soul-searching,I'm sticking with cable, which will be installed this week. I've heard all the arguments about cable being a shared resource that gets worse as your neighbors subscribe, but I'm not fooled that easily. Even with DSL you're at the mercy of the ISP - no matter what the service you'll always be sharing a line at some point. Isn't the Internet one big shared line? Anyway, fiber-optics sound more impressive! ____________________________________________________________         A   W O R D   F R O M   M Y   S P O N S O R S                 http://www.nsoftware.com/ ____________________________________________________________ IP*Works! V5 ASP Edition includes 30 components, optimized for Active Server Page programming.  The standard IP*Works! components are all included, HTTP, FTP, SMTP, POP, IMAP, REXEC etc. Also included are new, higher level components such as WebUpload, WebForm, FileMailer, TraceRoute, and more.   The package includes sample ASP pages demonstrating how to access Web Services such as Yahoo Stock Quotes and UPS Address Verification.                 http://www.nsoftware.com/ ____________________________________________________________                     T H E   D I A R Y                The events of the last week             http://CoverYourASP.com/ShowDiary.asp ____________________________________________________________ ______ 13 Jun ______ - So many have asked recently where to get the download from that I've added it to the navigation bar at the top of every page. The Bookmark function got moved to the footer. ______ 14 Jun ______ - In a flash of inspiration today I thought of a way to make the site "appear" to be quicker. The problem started when I started showing banners served from the ASP Alliance Ad Consortium of which I'm a member. Because they were served from client-side JavaScript it meant that although the pages still took the same time to render, they appeared much slower. This is because the table's don't render until they know how big the result from the JavaScript is going to be. Now, however, I wrap the JavaScript in an iframe, which has a width/height attribute. Hey Presto - the tables can now render immediately, without waiting for the image to download! ______ 15 Jun ______ - This is very impressive, and a lot of fun... Powers of Ten. Thanks to Clint Lewis for the link to Science, Optics and You in his angryCoder column this morning. http://micro.magnet.fsu.edu/primer/java/scienceopticsu/powersof10/index.html http://www.angrycoder.com/author_bio.aspx?aid=6 ______ 18 Jun ______ - Thanks to Paul Hanly who wrote to me today pointing out that because the download is more than a month old, no diary entries are shown! So I've updated the download to include all the latest diary entries, and refreshed all the code. ______ 19 Jun ______ - Nothing to do with ASP, but today I consider myself "the luckiest man man man on the face of the Earth", as Lou Gehrig would say. My wife got tired of spending $100 to get her hair highlighted, so she bought a $10 hair coloring kit and then made me apply it. Can you spell S-T-R-E-S-S? Luckily after the second application (it was CYA orange after the first one) it turned out fine, but let me tell you: even if they beg DON'T ever do it. http://real.frozenzone.com:7070/ramgen/bucs/gehrig.rm ______ 20 Jun ______ - Motto: Don't program at 2am. Repeat as often as necessary. I just trashed my database, and will have to restore it from backups tomorrow and merge them in. Sorry for the inconvenience if you were a witness...or heaven-forbid were lost in the scramble. ______ 21 Jun ______ - Please remember that even though the feedback page says that your email address is optional, you must supply it if you want an answer from me! Sounds obvious, but today I'd typed a reply and sent it before I noticed the return email address was empty. "George", having problems with running the downloaded site under IE 6, can you contact me? ______ 22 Jun ______ - I took a quick visit over to MaximumASP yesterday after their new ad (top right) appeared. Yeah, I know they're an advertiser, but their web site is truly one of the best designed, prettiest sites I've seen since GotDotNet. The Cool Focus gadgets they use look cool too. http://ads.aspalliance.com/adredir.asp?id=61&m=6 http://gotdotnet.com/ Anyway I'm feeling inspired to do a complete re-design... ____________________________________________________________            R E C O M M E N D   T H E   S I T E !         Please recommend my site to your colleagues            http://CoverYourASP.com/Recommend.asp ____________________________________________________________ Two new articles this time: "Submitting data to a form with IP*Works! WebForm" ASPRSS has a subscription service that automatically submits articles to all the ASP directories out there. See how I submit the data to their forms using the IP*Works! WebForm component http://CoverYourASP.com/FormSubmit.asp "IFRAME's...and IE 5.5" Sometimes IFRAME's can solve a big problem, but their interaction with IE 5.5 is something you need to know about - it's totally bizarre! http://CoverYourASP.com/iframe.asp ____________________________________________________________               H E R O   O F   T H E   W E E K ! ____________________________________________________________ Paul Hanly is easily this weeks Hero. After discovering the site I have a constant stream of very insightful suggestions and tips. Some more follow in the feedback section, but here's one that could be fun to play with: "Some users who are hobbiests may wish to use PWS on a port other than 80 in combination with a domain name from http://www.dns2go.com so they can show off their ASP pages to friends without having to buy hosting which caters for ASP and Access or SQL. The port on PWS can be changed: 1. First Stop PWS or at RUN type C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\inetsrv\pws.exe /stop     [If PWS is running it the change may not take effect] 2. At a DOS prompt type the following     [Location of mdutil.exe]  C:\mdutil.exe SET W3SVC/1/Serverbindings ":8080:" 3. Start PWS or at RUN type C:\WINDOWS\SYSTEM\inetsrv\inetinfo.exe -e w3svc 4. In webbrowser type http://localhost:8080 to verify change     to port 8080 5. You may or may not have to restart your computer for the \     change to take affect. (This is from Harley on the microsoft.public.win98.pws4 newsgroup) Some of the ramifications are: 1. the PWS website button doesn't work 2. the PWS publish button doesn't work 3. relative URLs seem not to work because they are based on     http://localhost rather than on http://localhost:8080 To fix the relative urls I changed line 180 in init.asp to:   sBaseServer += ':8080/' + sURLOffset [ i ]; by inserting the :8080 in front of the /. This stuff might be a bit sensitive because one reason that people may wish to change their port on pws to other than 80 is because their ISP has it blocked and they may wish to check their terms of service to ensure that they aren't breaching them. When registering for dns2go they would use the new port number on the registration form if they are advised that port 80 is blocked when they try to register using port 80. If they try using port 80 and don't get the message it is blocked then they probably don't need to change the port. You can probably express all this a lot better than I can if you decide to use it. [No I can't! James] No need for reply or acknowledgement. [Too late! James] Just sent for what it's worth as an appreciation of the free download." Thanks again Paul. ____________________________________________________________                N E E D   A N   A S P   I S P ?         Use mine. You won't find a nicer bunch of guys.            Cheap, efficient and extremely helpful.                   http://EverPlanet.com/ ____________________________________________________________ I was a little sad to hear that the first site to publish an article of mine, "way back" in June 2000, is looking for a new owner. ASPcode.com was the first site I found that accepted links to articles - I remember being very excited by the idea! At the time my articles were written on my home page at http://ShawThing.com/ and I was getting 20 visitors a day. Publishing at ASPcode.com immediately made it jump to a dizzying 200 visitors and 1,000 page views a day! A recent talk with Editor Chris Duke revealed the sad news: "We are overwhelmed with other projects and are interested in pursuing the sale of the site.". So, if anyone is interested in taking over the (IMHO) very cool site, contact webmaster@aspcode.com. http://ASPcode.com/ (But be sensible! Please don't contact them unless you are serious.) ____________________________________________________________                      F E E D B A C K             Have something to say? Please share!             http://CoverYourASP.com/Contact.asp ____________________________________________________________ Andreas Warberg: "I don’t know whether Microsoft is to blame or not, but with IE6 build 2479 your site’s fonts are way too small. Probably just a Microbug, but I thought you might want to know." Me: Luckily I've stayed away from IE6 so far. I've heard nothing but bad things, so I'm not even going to install it. Thanks for sending me the screen capture Andreas - it has certainly rendered my site incorrectly in a number of ways. ______ George: "I downloaded your excellent site but I have difficulties running it. The first page opens ok, but when I try most of the front page links, they don't open and finally I receive the message "too many users connected" - which of course is not true. Do you have any ideas?" Me: [George didn't include his email, so I never got answers   to my questions below...] What does happen when you click a link? nothing? which ones do work? The site is set up by default to run from http://localhost/cya - is that where you run it? If not look at http://coveryourasp.com/downloadconfig.asp and http://coveryourasp.com/basehref.asp to change the arrays at the bottom of include/config.asp ______ Paul Hanly: "Hi James, Thanks for the acknowledgement re the diary. A suggestion if I may. On http://www.coveryourasp.com/PWS.asp I suggest you put a link to troubleshooting under the heading re Installing from Windows 98 CD so that people can fix the problem at the start as if they keep getting the error messages they may never progress far enough in the site to get to the troubleshooting link! I assume that (tens of) thousands of win98 cd's have the same problem, so amy as well fix it up front." Me: That would be a good idea - I'd never thought of actually helping people *not* get the problem in advance! ______ John Timar: "First, thanks for all the information available at your site.  I have inherited an environment I am not very familiar with, and the more reading and REAL examples I can find, the better I can do my job. Second, a minor nit. I originally found your site because I was looking for a way to validate email addresses. Your page came up and I tested a few addresses that I had and found that a trailing blank (e.g. "cfranco@cartech.com ") will throw off your test - this is a valid DNS entry and email address. Thanks again for the info!" Me: First I replied: Thanks for the tip - I'll make sure they're trimmed first! But, then... Actually John, now I've investigated, I'm not sure I will change it. My ValidateEmail.asp page calls a function in utils/email.asp called GetEmailRating and accepts a single email address. Having leading or trailing spaces causes the syntax check to fail, and I'm not convinced that's wrong. Well, let's be honest, I think that's right, and I'm sure you do too. However, readers should be protected from typos and copy/paste errors that may leave stray spaces. In fact my code copes with it perfectly in "real" use. My feedback form (and every other real use of email) calls the higher level function IsValidEmail, and this function accepts multiple addresses separated by ;: and you guessed it, spaces. So if you pass "   a@b.com    d@e.com ;  :  f@g.com" into IsValidEmail or SendEmail they will split the string into a@b.com, d@e.com and f@g.com with no spaces and work perfectly. Does this make sense? If anything, I may change ValidateEmail.asp (the only page that fails) so that it trims the form inputs first. ______ Conan: "You might want to check the syntax of your ROBOTS.TXT file at http://www.tardis.ed.ac.uk/~sxw/robots/check/ ;-) I've just discovered how to make one myself (after being bombarded with emails by my new 404.asp page, damn spiders), and I found this syntax checker -- Maybe it's out of date for current agents, but its good to be backward compatible, no?" Me: Excellent resource Conan, thanks. I found 2 or 3 "errors" and even if they didn't cause any real problems it's always handy to know the rules! ______ Kevin: "Hi James, I was wondering when you were going to publish the article on how you used paypal to upgrade membership.   I am interested in using the code on my site and hope to set up a subscription (members only) area." Me: Actually, paypal still don't support an automatic way of doing it. I've bugged them for months, but they are a little slow! PayPal has a serious flaw, in that anyone can grab the html of my webaccept button, modify the payment amount and submit it. Although that'll show up in the confirmation email I get, they don't pass the information onto the "Thanks" page. There is also no way of knowing if PayPal even called the Thanks page, or if a customer called it directly! So, the end result is that you cannot do anything "automatic" in the Thanks page of a real site trying to sell goods. For my new site, I've had to go to a manual process. See http://ASPRSS.com/MemberUpgrade.asp - and once I get an email saying they've paid I hop onto the database and upgrade the membership. ____________________________________________________________         A   W O R D   F R O M   M Y   S P O N S O R S      http://www.hexillion.com/refer.asp?id=cya7&dest=%2F ____________________________________________________________ Get FREE sample code, online utilities, and articles at Hexillion. Add intelligence to your ASP applications! Look up Whois records, check email addresses, do DNS lookups, find network problems with Ping and Traceroute, and more. http://www.hexillion.com/refer.asp?id=cya7&dest=%2F ____________________________________________________________             H A V E   I   H E L P E D   Y O U ?           If I've helped you, help me help others!             http://CoverYourASP.com/Donate.asp          ===> now with new ways to say thanks! <=== ____________________________________________________________ BTW, did you know that I've now been doing this for a year? I didn't realize until I spoke to ASPcode, and that reminded when I first posted my first article - June 2000. Man, a lot has happened since then. To celebrate, and to reward anyone who's read this far, I pulled my finger out this weekend and completely changed the look of the site! As I write this I haven't uploaded it yet, but it'll be up sometime on Monday. Surprisingly it's only taken 5 hours so far, including making the graphics. Hope you like it. ;-) Thanks Guys! Speak to you in two weeks. Warmest Regards, James Shaw james@CoverYourASP.com 885 Woodstock Road, Suite 430, #108 Roswell, GA 30075-2247, U.S.A. ____________________________________________________________                 S U B S C R I P T I O N S           Do you want to subscribe or unsubscribe?             http://CoverYourASP.com/Subscribe.asp ____________________________________________________________