____________________________________________________________ C o v e r Y o u r A S P . c o m Welcome to the latest newsletter! http://CoverYourASP.com/ ____________________________________________________________ I don't know if it's because the sun is shining again, or I was allowed to re-write from scratch something at work that had been bugging me, or that I've been approached by 4 other sites to partner with them (3 this week!), or (and this is my guess) because an old friend from England flew into the Peach State on business and brought a supply of my favorite hand-rolling tobacco after a year of not smoking....but... Ain't life grand! I open my site with the words: This ASP stuff is fun! Don't take it too seriously. Have fun with it. Remember you can't learn how to program, only learn the syntax. You'll just know if you're a programmer. ;-) ____________________________________________________________ A W O R D F R O M M Y S P O N S O R S http://www.developersdex.com ____________________________________________________________ Developersdex delivers the world's largest index for Microsoft web technologies. Search, post, and reply to over 20 of the most popular ASP, SQL, VB and XML Usenet newsgroups. Devdex indexes over 5,000 new resources everyday including those from MSDN, ASP.NET, 15seconds, 4guysfromrolla, ASPToday, XML and ActionJackson.com just to name a few. If it's on the NET it's on Devdex! http://www.developersdex.com ____________________________________________________________ T H E D I A R Y The events of the last week http://CoverYourASP.com/ShowDiary.asp ____________________________________________________________ ______ 17 Mar ______ - Don't forget, the newsletters are also available to read on the site on my archives page. http://CoverYourASP.com/Archives.asp ______ 18 Mar ______ - Want to hear something bizarre? One advertiser has the exact same banner displayed in each of 5 slots in my banner system. Each banner has been displayed over 12,000 times (a fair sample?) - but the clickthrough rates range from 1.02% to 1.31%. It might not seem a lot, but 30% is the difference between a fair and a successful banner! http://CoverYourASP.com/BannerApp.asp ______ 19 Mar ______ - I get a lot of nice testimonials from readers, but I couldn't resist sharing one from "Conan" this morning: "Best ASP site? Hell, best damn tutorial site ever! It's helped me so much I can't thank you enough... download the site... fantastic... I hope you get the ASP Guild 2001 Top Site Award, you certainly deserve it!" http://www.aspguild.org/group/~12/asp/voteasp2001.asp?a=171 ______ 21 Mar ______ - Came across a new site today - ASPERS.NET. Lots to see, including a new ASP resource similar to Aspin.com. http://www.aspers.net/cgi-bin/award/rank.cgi?action=in&id=cyasp http://www.essentialoem.com/ ______ 22 Mar ______ - Thanks to Wayne Lambright for pointing out that my PayPal donate button was broken, then sending a donation when it was fixed! Check out his neat survey poll at http://udextensions.com/poll/. Donate on my improved page: http://CoverYourASP.com/Donate.asp - Did you know that I publish two "feeds" now from this web site, that you can tap into? The first is an ASPWire-style feed at http://CoverYourASP.com/GetArticles.asp and the other is a new XML feed at http://CoverYourASP.com/RSS.asp. The latter can be seen in action at Userland.com - an article coming soon on the RSS format... http://my.userland.com/viewChannel$4151 ______ 23 Mar ______ - I just added support for Persits ASPEmail component - anyone have any more? My code now support ASPEmail, CDONTS, ASPMail and JMail. http://ASPEmail.com/ - I also improved the email code by using the regular expression /[\s;,]/ to split the email address you typed into the recommend form. Translation? You can now recommend the site to more than one person at a time - separate the emails with space, comma or semi-colon. The IsValidEmail( ) function supports this too, and then validates each email address individually. ____________________________________________________________ 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 ____________________________________________________________ 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 ____________________________________________________________ No new articles this week! ____________________________________________________________ A W O R D F R O M M Y S P O N S O R S http://www.codecharge.com/ ____________________________________________________________ Powerful Code Generation tool for Professionals and Beginners - develop database-driven web applications in matters of hours. Developing anything from Grids & Forms to Portals and Intranet just became easier. CodeCharge generates ASP, JSP, PHP, Perl, CFML and comes with examples of Online Store, Bug Tracking System, Task Management System, etc. Visit http://www.codecharge.com/ ____________________________________________________________ H E R O O F T H E W E E K ! ____________________________________________________________ As you know, I like to get inside information about other web sites - it fascinates me when I discover that a hugely successful web site is run by a few quite normal people! This week I asked aspin.com to come clean. I really appreciate the reply that I got back!... "The idea for Aspin.com was conceived back in November of 1998 by Pedro Pequeno (Me). I took the idea to two of my closest friends, Tony and Manny Domingues and proposed building it. The only problem was that none of us knew how to script ASP pages. Sure that was a bit of a setback but we had some previous experience with CGI scripting in Perl and VB programming in MS Access so we were optimistic. First things first, we bought ourselves a copy of Wrox's Professional ASP 2.0 book and ventured off into the world of ASP scripting. Meanwhile, we all worked on picking a company name... after many iterations, we decided on InfoGenius from the idea of being the best at managing information and helping people master ASP or for that matter anything else we made a search engine for. At the time Tony was in charge of business matters and Manny was to help design and program, however, do to their time limitations, they decided to drop out of the operation a short time after it's conception. Undaunted, I forged on with the Aspin.com idea. I was in my senior year of college at Penn State University in my final semester of Electrical Engineering (Spring 1999) and continued to work on the Aspin.com project day and night. A typical day that semester started at about 10:00AM to make my first Engineering class. Even though I barely ever made it to this class, it was the only thing that got me up that early! Between 10AM and 4PM, I usually had about 4 classes... lets just say that I really tried to make it to at least 1 class per day. My lab mates didn't really appreciate it too much and pretty much carried me through my senior project (thanks Brian Alexander and Brian Totten). After my classes for the day, I would return back to my dorm and glue myself to my PC until about 4AM in the morning. Eating and Sleeping were usually 2nd priority to coding. I ended up losing about 15 pounds that semester... which was good for attracting more girls but unless they were going to help me code, I didn't really pay much attention to them. So about three months after I started designing the first layouts and concept designs for the site, I released Aspin.com to the world on March, 1st 1999. The site traffic grew steadily over time and before I knew it, the site was serving up a million page-views per month! Rather than stopping there, we decided to take the concept to other programming and software markets like JSP with our Jspin.com site, Application Service Providers with our FindApps.com site and finally our newest addition 411ASP.net for microsoft's new ASP.NET community. Currently the InfoGenius crew consists of about a half a dozen employees. Our high-strung crew is made up of a diverse group of college students, that range from brainiac programmers to Mountain Dew addicted website support guys. We all have a lot of fun together, and don't really think of work as "work." The most important people though are the half a million web developers that support our sites every month. They are the true innovators in this community. We get emails everyday from users showing us what they have made, and they never cease to impress us with the innovative creations that they come up with. From us at Aspin.com and InfoGenius, thank you all for your continued support of our sites!" http://InfoGenius.com/ http://aspin.com/ ____________________________________________________________ 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! V4 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/ ____________________________________________________________ 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/ ____________________________________________________________ Interesting fact from the logs this week: Chris Oak from my ISP - http://EverPlanet.com - mentioned something interesting about my bottom-of-the-line $8.95 account with them... "You're pushing some bandwidth! You pushed 21 MB in 3 hours" Seems a lot to me, but I have nothing to compare it to - do you? ____________________________________________________________ F E E D B A C K Have something to say? Please share! http://CoverYourASP.com/Contact.asp ____________________________________________________________ Thanks to David Levine, Steve Annells, Robert Brooks and Kevin McCurley who answered my question "What is WebFountain?" Kevin described it simply: "It is a large-scale crawler for use in our web research activities here at IBM Almaden Research Center." Robert added a little more: "Why is that name (and that picture!) familiar?" A little more poking discovered the reason... McCurley is the insane genius behind digicrime.com, one of the first sites I ever surfed on the 'net! He purposely plays hacker tricks with JavaScript, doing things like infinitely cascading windows and scary "your computer is about to die" spoofs. Everything is safely behind "don't click this or 'X' will happen" links -- of course, being a hacker myself (as in, self-taught by seeing how things work), that only made them all the more intriguing. I'm sure whatever he does with the WebFountain spider, it will be (nearly) harmless -- and in any case, very interesting!" Thanks for your all your help in the investigation! ______ Chris Snider (regarding my question, "What is this user agent: Mozilla/4.0 (compatible; MSIE 5.0; Win32)?": "Since Microsoft has released the wininet.dll (browser object inside IE) and also the msXMLhttp object (with the XML Parser) you could have a spider built by someone that is not part of one of the major search engines. There is code at devdex (http://www.freevbcode.com/ShowCode.Asp?ID=2143) that VB coders can use to write their own off-line site grabber. I also ran across another vb project that takes a URL argument and begins processing the pages at the URL for ever adding the items to a treeview control. It is possible that someone is using something similar on your site. Whoever is doing it is using the MS Internet Explorer (or inet control) from a Win 95/98/NT/2000 system." Me: Thanks Chris. I figured the same thing. ______ Mark Craies: "Hi James, Found your site yesterday, downloaded your code and installed it on my W2K box. Just going through the setup and I see you don't yet have support for the ASPEmail component by Persits in the config.asp and email.asp files. I noticed your comment that says to ask you for others so here is a request to add the Persits component. I've had a go at setting it up myself but I'm not sure about the = 826 etc in the // Email server constants. I'm using this instead of ASPMail as my ISP uses it and its easier to write for it on my test environment. Cheers Mark" Me: Thanks Mark. I've added support for the Persits component and uploaded it to the site. Thanks for the feedback! ______ Claudia Botts: "I just wanted to say thank you. I am a (relative) newbie to web programming and I can use all the (free) help I can get. I just wanted to say maybe you'd wanna consider revising your e-mail validation code to allow people (me) to send it to more than one person (using semicolons between addresses). I work with a group of people who could benefit from your site and others like it, but I had to send the recommendation one at a time. I know, you're probably thinking, "Poor, pitiful you! Big Deal!" but I was just really just wondering if your validation code could do multiples. I guess it could, I'd just have to loop it through each string after a semicolon (after the first one), right? Well, I guess I just ansered my own question, but I still wanted to say thanks!!" Me: How spooky! I have just finished implementing that very thing! I changed my SendEmail() and IsValidEmail() functions to use a regular expression to split the string. Here's a snippet from the new IsValidEmail() function: // test all email addresses sent in var sEmailList = sEmail.split ( /[\s;,]/ ); var nEmail; for ( nEmail in sEmailList ) { // validate sEmailList [ nEmail ]... So now you can recommend all your friends at once, and the email addresses will still be validated. Cool, eh? http://CoverYourASP.com/Recommend.asp ______ Lily Liu sent some detailed explanations on the steps she had to take to get the site working on her computer. It seems she had a few more problems than normal. I appreciate the feedback though. "Hi James, Thanks for the help. Here is my path to make your site working: 1. problem: "Server object error 'ASP 0177 : 80029c4a' Server.CreateObject Failed /cya/utils/Email.asp, line 31 Error loading type library/DLL." solution: change the line to oMail = new ActiveXObject( "CDONTS.NewMail" ); 2. problem: "Microsoft JScript runtime error '800a0030' Error in loading DLL /cya/utils/Email.asp, line 37" solution: IUSER_xxx does not have enough privilege, in WINNT\SYSTEM32, change all file permissions to RX 3. problem with oMail.send in Email.asp (documented in your website) solution: change Mailroot\Pickup permission for IUSER_xxx to RW 4. "unspecified error" (documented in your website) solution: in include\Config.asp file change: var sDBDriver=sAccess2000; and convert database to Access 2000 format. 5. "...cannot open the file ..., It is already opened exclusively, or you need permission..." (documented?) solution: go to the CYA folder, change permission for all files to RX, change database permission to RWX for IUSER_xxx. There are still some minor problems which can be more easily changed. Thanks for opening up your website, I'm sure that I can benefit form the site. Best wishes." ______ Vu: "James...very impress with what you have been able to do in the amount of time considering this is still only a "hobby". I have been programming ASP only several months now and want to go down the right path. I have taken you advice and have started looking the EditPlus editor. What is your advice regarding debugging of ASPs. Should I invest time in learning something like Microsoft Visual InterDev. I do alot of work from home on a Win98 system. Please advise...thanks, Vu." Me: To be honest I don't do much debugging in the traditional sense. I don't use InterDev - the disadvantages outweigh the advantages (for me). So, debugging ASP for me consists of doing this: http://coveryourasp.com/debug.asp Not very glamorous, but it works... ;-) To be perfectly frank, JavaScript and the ASP objects are toys in many ways. I'm glad that I learned C on DOS first, because that gave me a very deep understanding of low level programming. From that base, every other language is trivial. I'm looking forward to C# but it'll be strange having garbage collection in C! Anyway, I digress. Whenever I need to do anything "complicated" on a web page, I'll write a COM component (in C++ with ATL) and hence all the debugging I could want with VC6. ASP pages *very* rarely need more than "print statements". ____________________________________________________________ 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 ____________________________________________________________ Just to broaden your horizons, nothing about the site at all to close this newsletter. Instead, check out more awesome cars from Chrysler that were at a recent car show - they so outclass the other manufacturers concept cars! (watch the URL wrap) http://carpoint.msn.com/autoshow2001/default.asp? content=article¶m=OEM_Chrysler_DaimlerChrysler2 Thanks Guys! Speak to you next week. Warmest Regards, James Shaw james@CoverYourASP.com 885 Woodstock Road, Suite 430, #108 Roswell, GA 30075-2247, U.S.A. ____________________________________________________________ V O T E F O R Y O U R F A V O R I T E S I T E (or don't, if it's not CoverYourASP.com) http://www.aspguild.org/group/~12/asp/voteasp2001.asp?a=171 ____________________________________________________________ ____________________________________________________________ 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 ____________________________________________________________