The CoverYourASP front page

When CoverYourASP's front page was redesigned recently I moved all the links to my articles into the database.

The source code for the front page became a lot simpler as a result (and hence maintainable), and much more flexible. For example, to display links to the articles sorted by popularity I could use the code below.

DBGetRecords ( 'SELECT * FROM Articles ORDER BY Hits DESC;' ); while ( !oRecordSet.EOF ) {    // the short description of the article, as a hyperlink    Out ( '<br><b><a href="' + oRecordSet ( "URL" ) + '">' + oRecordSet ( "ShortDescr" ) + '</a></b>' );           // the long description of the article    Out ( '<br>' + oRecordSet ( "LongDescr" ) );              // the category    Out ( '<br><i>From <b>' + oRecordSet ( "Category" ) + '</b>, ' );    // date last updated    Out ( 'published ' + oRecordSet ( "UpdateDate" ) );    // number of times viewed    Out ( ', ' + oRecordSet ( "Hits" ) + ' views</i>' );    oRecordSet.MoveNext(); }

That's not my code incidentally, but it demonstrates the point. (You should't use SELECT *, instead use SELECT field1,field2..)

Anyway, beefing up this code and moving it into a function simplifed the home page even more. I just pass in the title, how to sort the data and how many records to show, as below:

// ======================================== // the what's new section - the last articles to be published // ======================================== ShowArticles ( 'What\'s new? The articles I\'ve been working on recently...', nByDate, 3 ); // ======================================== // the what's popular section - the most popular articles // ======================================== ShowArticles ( 'What\'s popular? Read what your peers think is most interesting!', nByHits, 5 ); // ======================================== // articles by category // ======================================== ShowArticles ( 'Articles by category', nByCategory, 1000 );

Part 2: Administering the Articles table...