My servers hard drive decided it had enough at the weekend and corrupted my database. Hence the recent downtime, sorry. Restoring backups didnt go terribly smoothly either, so there may be a few of you new members that got lost in the chaos.

Still, to make up for it, I am now back in "developer land" after two years building OurLittleNet. That business doesnt need my full-time support any more, so I have started CoverYourASP.NET and Dozing Dogs. They are building to a big launch of my new product on November 1st!

I'm so busy at my other job that I don't spend as much time here at CYA as I'd like. Still, I'm still running the monthly contest, and still giving away prizes donated by many kind souls out there.

Developer communities are pretty special you know. I have more good friends on email lists than in the real world - ok, they are still real, but I only see them once a year maybe! Next month we're meeting again at Microsoft (we as in ASP Insiders) and that is always a fun trip.

If you've never been invited to MS, they treat you well. All meals are generally provided, plus fun events n the evenings. Mostly it's just great hanging out after hours with Scott G, Rob H, Dave W, Scott F, Plip (of course), Wally M...and many more. I'll be there August 15-19. Hopefully I'll be back here to write (ooops, blog) about it. ;-)

Here's another great tip for those of you running your own web servers (or just plain curious) - download a free trial of HttpWatch and take a look at how IE really talks to a web site. It's fascinating, and I've learned a lot the last few days.

Since I run OurLittleNet on a 3 server web farm this insight is important - already I have made changes to the site and server to optimize my bandwidth!

Adobe's online PDF service didn't even work. They didn't support CSS - can you believe that? I installed trial versions of the first four companies found by Google and *none* would correctly render transparent gifs.

Then I found ePrint, an HTML to PDF tool from Lead Technologies and it works *perfectly*.

Their PDF was identical to the web page, their product was easy to use, and it's cheap! Highly recommended.

March's contest starts with SharpPower Corp providing a copy of RapTier

January was certainly our best month ever over at OurLittleNet. We have some huge deals lined up too; two very large companies are talking to us now which is both fun and scary. ;-)

January's contest was won by Doug Page and George Macdiarmid. XHEO kindly continues to sponsor the contest during February!

Ron from Canada and Khartgar won December's contest and prizes from Steema Software.

Now January's contest is underway with XHEO's WebSkin product as the prize. As an aside, I'm currently evaluating their FormGuard product and so far I have been very impressed with it. More later on that...

It's just the luck of the draw, although both increased their chances a LOT by using the site in October and racking up those points. I'm so busy outside CYA that I can barely keep up with the contests (hence this one ended late) but I figure I've written everything I want to on ASP anyway..

Now we'll have a rest for November; no contest has been planned. No doubt I'll get sent some freebies by someone this month so we'll be back on in December. See you then. ;-)

Now the October contest is underway, with a chance to win two server licenses of the awesome ImageUtil component. As I said before, this is one prize that I had to buy for you guys and girls. It's that good!

I came across Chris Townsend a few months ago, but only downloaded the trial version last week when wanting to add some functionality to my OurLittleNet site. I've written code to resize images before, using the .NET System.Imaging classes but ImageUtil replaces all that with a few simple lines of code.

How few? Consider this: in TEN lines of code my site now resizes and compresses images that are too wide to fit the site, and converts bmp, tiff and png images to jpeg automatically. Smooth is an understatement, and (don't tell Chris this) it's far too cheap.

I've even taken the unprecented step of buying a couple of copies to give away in next months contest. That's the first time I've bought prizes!

Unfortunately I had to rush off to a 7am meeting, so I couldn't fix it until nearly 9am. I'm sorry if you were affected.

The problem? I have no idea. All the database permissions were correct, so I rebooted the server. That fixed the problem. Like I said, bizarre...

Scott has helped me out with some very cool suggestions for improving the code behind OurLittleNet which should make it even more scaleable than it is today. ORCSweb now host OurLittleNet on one of their shared web farms - amazing value at just $200 per month. Everything you've heard about their legendary service is true, and then some. Truly, for top-of-the-range ASP.NET hosting these guys cannot be touched.

So, if you need some serious ASP.NET Architecture implementation, contact Wally.

We're lucky enough to get March's prizes from Neil Holmes at VisualASP who has just re-written their site and released new versions of their awesome components. I have one component pack to give away and one copy of the new ClickEDGE Web Schedule.

Check out how I threw away my Google PageRank..

I was looking for a .NET component to change the size and compression of uploaded images and came across ImageUtil. I wanted a few more details, so I fired off an email. I got a very helpful detailed response almost immediately. I wrote back with a suggestion and further questions and got another quick response. Bearing in mind that this is a very cheap component I was amazed by this support. With the ability to resize ~4000 images in under a minute this is one component that I'm sure I'll add to my bag of tricks. I'll let you know more later..

February's contest is worth over $1,200 with three copies of the newly launched version of WebZinc .NET! Originally launched in 1999, this is the new .NET version of an incredible tool that I hadn't seen until recently. It allows you to automatically submit forms and grab any data from any web site - treating any web site like a web service! Don't be sceptical - this really is a very cool tool to own.

There are a lot to choose from so check them out..

Today Wayne Berry of XCompress.com came through yet again for me in a big way. Understand something first, serving compressed content to a huge variety of browsers requires a lot of dedication by a company. There are many bugs and "features" to work around. So when I reported a (very rare and unreproducible) problem to Wayne I wasn't expecting much.

But even though no-one else reported it, Wayne worked from my description of the issue and a copy of my event log and came up with a potential fix. I don't know whether or not it has fixed the problem (only time will tell), but the service was very impressive. Don't hesitate to visit XCompress.com.

Hopefully I just gave three people a good start for 2003 though, having just sent them a license for devMail.Net which was last month's contest prize. The lucky recipients were Anthony Brown of Westminster, Colorado, Buzz Morley of Edgecomb, Maine and Tom Clausen of Fort Collins, Colorado. Congratulations Guys!

Our first contest for 2003 is now underway with a personal favorite of mine, aspNetEmail. Written by good friend Dave Wanta of 123aspx.com fame this component is what I use on all my OurLittleNet Neighborhood sites. Highly recommended!

I'm always skeptical about these sites that give you $5 for signing up or 2% off purchases made through their site, but I tried it anyway. This morning I received notice that I got $41.68 back from ebates because of my purchase. Ok, 2% ain't going to make me rich, but $40 is a lot of beer and pizza, ok? I even recommend installing their Moe Money Maker in IE - I've had no problems with it at all and it did tell me about an offer that wasn't publicized on a site that saved me more money.

This month we go from 2 prizes to 3! The brand new devMail.Net is featured. This is a full-service email component that you can use to send and receive emails!

November's contest is underway now, with the awesome 1 Click DB being the main prize. This is the product I use personally to modify databases online, and the new version keeps getting better!

• At some point over the weekend I shall install a copy of XCompress - a seemingly very cool product that came highly recommended to me by fellow ASP Elite. Hopefully you won't see any problems, just a much faster site! If you do see anything out of the ordinary, please let me know.

RichTextBox stands out among a field of wanna-be's as the rich text editor for ASP.NET sites. I've used it extensively on a project I've been working on for 6 months - in fact I almost built the site around this tool! Enter the contest and have a chance to win a version...or if you can't wait, buy RichTextBox� Standard or Professional now.

It is a free add-in for Outlook whose concept is simple and clever. If anyone else using SpamNet gets some unsolicited email they click the Block button, and everyone else on the network gets updated.

Spam gets moved to your Spam folder so you have a last chance to review it, but it's very unlikely to be wrong. I certainly highly recommend it if you use Outlook. Check it out

Wow. I still remember the excitement of putting CYA online on September 9th 2000. Almost 2 years later a lot has changed. Becoming invited to become an ASP Ace by Charles Carroll opened a lot of secret doors, and led me to be invited to Redmond to meet the ASP.NET team. I've met a lot of good people over the last 2 years, and had a lot of fun. Thank you everyone for visiting and forming a great community!

For those who have looked before, this version does away with the Flash interface - check it out.

• What a weird month! My house got hit by lightning (or at least it must have hit close by), and put 3 computers, my router and my cable modem out of action. I had to replace network cards, motherboards and a whole bunch of other stuff before I was back online...anyway, the upshot is that there will be no contest next month. And today is my Daughters 8th Birthday so I gotta run to help out.. ;-)

The July contest is underway and is a little experiment - it's the first time I've given away a pure ASP.NET component as the main prize - it just won't work under ASP. It is a world-class component that I use in my .NET work.

As always, the site has been updated, but updating the download will take a few days...

I'm sorry it's taken so long, but May has been the craziest month of my life! After 6 job offers and handing in my resignation the strangest thing happened. My current employer asked me to stay on and work from home (and made it worth my while). So all the pain and suffering over the last few months was almost for nothing! Hopefully now I can return to the CoverYourASP project in a better state of mind...

I'm looking for volunteers to teach me how to take this site open-source, and also for a small trusted band of what I'll call CYA Evangelists to help me run that aspect of the site. If you're a long-time CYA member that has watched the growth of the site over the last 2 years then I want to hear from you!

You'll have full administrator access to the site and will help manage the code submitted by others. It's not a privilege I'll give lightly, but there will be rewards given to those who step up to the plate. I'm looking forward to taking the site to the next stage of development - and you, the readers, will benefit too. Already I have had some very cool modifications to the code.

If you think you're an Evangelist, or just want to offer advice on open-source, please contact me...

Mystery solved! Scott McCain let me know that an article of mine went out in a WebDevPro newsletter - links from an email don't show up as referrers, so that explains why I couldn't track it down from the log...

• CafePress have come up with some cool new items in my store - this basketball hoop and some cool tile coasters are just two examples. I can't resist getting this stuff and giving it away at the local ASP.NET user group!

By the way, my host EverPlanet would have course have done this for me, but they were going to wait until my traffic died down in the evening. I did it because I didn't want to be vulnerable for even a few hours. ;-)

• The March contest was won by Bill Gowan of North Rose, NY - he will soon be the proud owner of the awesome Pensaworks Spd E-Letter Developers Edition and the best ASP.NET book so far: ASP.NET Unleashed by Stephen Walther. Congratulations Bill!

The April contest again features a favorite component of mine: Hexillion's HexGadgets - an amazingly useful collection of components including the famed HexValidEmail that I personally use.

Then there was Big Shane with an unusual password(!) and Don with the simplest password ever. I'm intrigued to know how easily Aaron-the-llama can type his too (I couldn't). Steve, are you really from that town? ICU2 Robert.

Fellow ASP Ace Scott Watermasysk is even a member and regular visitor (didn't know that Scott!). Some good URL's too: StickyWicketDesigns.com, crabtree-evelyn.com (my favorite after-shave ever), Mmmagic.com to name a few..

Now another month-long contest has begun, this time featuring the excellent Pensaworks Spd E-Letter worth $750 and my favorite ASP.NET book - ASP.NET Unleashed. Good luck!

• If you run a web site, here is an interesting article for you. Steve Clason wrote an excellent piece on how Google's page ranking algorithm works. Since Google is easily my top referrer I found this fascinating. Take a look at Link Popularity Made Simple (Sort Of).

Now Internet.com are claiming ownership of John's domain names and have taken him to court based on copyright infringement. He has been forced to stop publishing WebDevelopers.com until the issue has been resolved, so has moved all of his content to a new site: DevMatch.com. Personally, I this is a tough call to make. Internet.com were first to register their name, and John's is very similar, but should it matter? Should they both be allowed to exist?

I've also added my five favorite ASP.NET books to the rotation on the right, and to my Resources page. Just until I write CoverYourASP.NET you understand, then this site will return to "Classic ASP" only!

Please note that this contest is now drawn monthly, not bi-weekly. To get in sync this contest will run until the end of February. With such a valuable prize I hope no-one will mind!

I find this totally amazing. Users that develop ASP under Windows 95/98/ME and PWS will undoubtedly feel betrayed when they discover that they can no longer run ASP on the much-hyped XP. Of course 2000 or XP Pro is what developers should be developing on, but to cut off the amateur ASP developer seems spiteful and ill-conceived. Worse: I suspect that there is little or no difference between versions of XP - XP Home could easily run IIS if the DLL's were shipped and a couple re-compiled. Maybe even a simple registry change might do it, although that would probably have been found by now!

When I started it was a big advantage that I could literally start programming ASP on day 1 with Windows 98. I would not have upgraded to NT just to see how ASP worked. I was comparing ASP, PHP and ColdFusion and a part of my decision came from how quickly and easily I could learn. It seems to me that the balance has now tipped ever-so-slightly.

If any of you CYA-veterans would like to help out by answering any questions on the CYA list, I'd appreciate it.

The long-awaited 1450+ page ASP.NET Unleashed book is out and up for grabs, together with over $500-worth of components from Hexillion. I expect you back here straight after opening the presents, ok?

Yes, I have 3 wonderful children and I keep the weekends and evenings until bedtime for them. After bedtime is when I work - luckily they go to bed by 7:30. ;-)

So last night someone points Wget/1.6 at my site. This crawler has bugs (as they all do), so it starts requesting pages that don't exist, sending me a bunch of HTTP 404 emails. Needless to say I have now added this crawler to my list of banned user agents and redirect it to here. If you'd like to see how I do this, read "Redirecting the web crawlers..

• Since I won't have time to wish you all the best tomorrow, I thought I'd post a Happy Thanksgiving a little early! I know you guys outside the States don't have this holiday, but here it's the perfect time to relax with family and friends. Not so relaxing for the turkeys though...

• Thanks to Mickey Mullin for another handy improvement - I've added code to the SetBaseHref function to cope with the site being run on a different port to 80.

• 

At 6:30am EST the first CoverYourASP contest got underway! Thanks to Sams Publishing and CodeCharge I have a new book and fully licensed component to give away. It's not your usual kind of contest either - you can see your chances of winning increase as you browse the site. More...

To celebrate I will be going live with the new bi-weekly contest on Monday November 12th. Lots of very cool free components to give away, and an unusual way to run a contest...it's going to be great fun!

Important! Any changes you made to my database today (newsletter subscriptions, membership changes, site personalization) may have been left behind as the site moved. I'll try and fix them up, but with me flying back to UK on Wednesday, it may be a week or so...Sorry.

Thanks for your support over the last year everyone!

• I finally started to replace my tacky banners - there's a new 468x60 one on my "link to me" page if anyone needs to update their links. Thanks.

• I think I have .NET Beta 2 installed now, but I haven't had the nerve to run anything yet. I had quite a few weird and wonderful errors, and another 4 hours of installation, but it'll be worth it! I have a week off now, so maybe I'll get as far as "Hello World"...

• I made an obvious improvement to the search yesterday - should have thought of it before! Now I first search the database for ALL the words you type, then I search again for ANY of the words. The former is likely to give a very short, accurate list, but the latter will usually find something when obscure phrases are searched for.

Try [email protected] - you say it's ok but the domain and email don't exist.

WRONG! Simply typing http://www.fsf.com into a browser doesn't test if the domain exists! Go to Hexillion's validation page and enter that email address and you'll see a conversation with the fsf.com mail server!

• Added a new user agent to the array in utils/Init.asp's RedirectSpiders function. eCatch is now redirected to the JustDownload.htm page.

• Relatorious. Strange kind of word, isn't it? Every search engine I've tried comes back with the same result too - there'/s_nothing_about_this_word_on_the_entire_internet_So_why_does_someone_keep_trying_to_open_a_page_on_my_site_called_relatorious__I_.html'd love to know...

• I changed the site around a little - the affiliate sites that kindly publish my articles are now rotating around the bottom of every page, and all shown on the Resources page. I moved them into a new database table and now have more room on the right side of the site. A lot of database code has been updated to (almost) work with SQL Server too...more later!

• I just added support for Persits ASPEmail component - anyone have any more? My code now support ASPEmail, CDONTS, ASPMail and JMail.

• 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...

• Other minor improvements - I s t r e t c h e d out the footer onto one line, so it filled the available space better!

• A sad day today! I finally relinquished my lead in the ASP Guild's Top Site race. Just goes to show - size does matter!

• An article about accepting credit cards is on it's way - VisualASP just bought another advertising slot with my hidden form. It worked! This is "grown-up" stuff...

• The site membership just had a quick burst and sped past 1,000 - there are now more members than newsletter subscribers! Wanna join in?

• Thanks in part to 4GuysFromRolla, who kindly put me on their front page yesterday, I had the best day ever. Over 12,000 page views, with peaks of more than 1,000 an hour mid afternoon. All on my ISP's cheapest shared hosting plan and an Access database!

• Remember to go out at lunch time or leave work early tonight. I don't want to get blamed if you forget your valentines gift! You can read my articles tomorrow... ;-)

• Improved the Search.asp SSI - thanks to Hakan Eskici again - reserved characters (like ' or %) are now stripped from the search expression using the line below:
    sSearch = sSearch.replace ( /['"%]/g, '' );

• Here's a question - why are 6 out of the 20 prospective members (those that haven't yet confirmed their membership) using rediffmail.com email addresses? Is it coincidence? Certainly it is a domain where the majority of people ask to sign up, then 10 days later the account gets automatically deleted...

• Search away! - an article on how I implemented the keyword search is coming soon...the source code is already in the download though.

• If you're getting the message "'oRecordSet.EOF' is not an object" please download the source again - the error reporting has been much improved!

• Quick Tip: Don't trust anyone that quotes how many "hits" their site gets! My recently enabled WebTrends log analyser shows me for the first time this statistic and it looks very impressive to the uninitiated - I'm getting 2 million hits per month at the moment! Hits are requests for any file on your server - SSI, images, even the robots.txt file!

• Fed up with receiving emails from my HTTP 500 error handler when people load my Server Side Includes directly, I modified Handle500100.asp to only send email if the page in error is in the root folder.

• Added a new page to the trouble shooting section to help you fix problems installing Personal Web Server.

• I succumbed to reason last night and added the Opera browser to the list of "supported" browsers to my clickthrough system. To make it easier to share the code I added a new SSI, called Browser.asp which contains a new function IsKnownBrowser( ).

• Added a little exception handling to utils/database.asp. This is just the start of putting using real error handling, and was just hacked in this morning in response to the security issue I found. I'll document it when my heart rate returns to normal...

• Fixed an error in CategoryPage.asp caused by my earlier upload - I just love my HTTP 500 handler!

• While looking at some search engine referrals today I noticed something a little disturbing! There were a few CoverYourASP web sites out there - not just mine! Downloaded copies have been put on the internet and indexed. So I've "enhanced" the legal statements to make it clear what the intention of this web site is! Also, the downloaded version has a banner highlighting the change..

• Many people want Personal Web Server, but don't have the Windows 98 CD. I've now updated the PWS article to include links to download PWS from microsoft.com.

• Passed 500,000 page views today. Thanks for your continued support - have you told all your friends? Got all your co-workers to vote?

• Code Updated: Fixed some HTTP 500.100 ASP errors that got reported when readers were playing around seeing what they could break! Calling BannerCounter.asp and CountLosses.asp directly is a lot less likely to generate errors now!

• Code Updated: Missed a vital step when I was re-organizing the BrandNewDay( ) function in utils/Init.asp recently. The GetDaysBanners( ) function wasn't being called, so I fixed that this morning.

• Excellent idea from Igor about the NeedAccessLevel function in utils/login.asp. Now when you try to access a page that needs a signed in member, like Personalize.asp, you get redirected back to that page after signing in. May do a little mini-article on that later...

• HTML101 - never, ever use spaces in your URLs. I uploaded 26 images yesterday for the new tutorials, and 24 of them had spaces in their name. So I just got a bunch of 404 emails from users who browsed my site with Netscape 4.7 - it couldn't cope...hehehehe!

• I've updated the download zip file to incorporate all the recent changes...

• Major About-face time! OK, I didn't like the idea of charging for content that most beginners needed before they could do anything with my code either. And I wasn't exactly flooded with money after offering the Silver member-only content.
So, I've now published all the previously hidden content - and have gone to my backup plan for Silver membership. Many of you ask for small individual components that you can download individually. That's a lot more work, but since you'll be paying for it...
Seriously, let me know what you think of this latest scheme...

• Made the Member Login page a little easier to understand.

• The silver members only content is now up to 20 pages, and is being proof-read before the new area is launched. Watch this space...

• It doesn't look like much has been updated recently, but a lot of pages have been improved in little ways. For example BannerReports.asp got a link to the article that explains how multiple clickthroughs are ignored. No changes big enough to mention on their own, but things are changing!

• Bjornar Henden suggested the contact page textarea should be larger, so I did so. All feedback gratefully received!

• My banner counting code, BannerCounter.asp, was improved so that only one click per IP address per day was deducted from the advertisers "pool" of clickthroughs. This stops malicious users spending the advertisers clicks, and helps ignore spiders.

• Another big change today, touching over 80 pages. To come in line with my new advertising push, I modified my page design to include a standard 468x60 banner. Tidied up a lot of pages at the same time.

• My friends at desasp.com suggested I publish my articles on a "feed" page, so they could download them. Here it is: GetArticles.asp

• Uploaded a form to display banner impression/clickthrough report. See it at BannerReports.asp. Will be improved over the next few days, then I'll write about all this new stuff!

• Completed the first stage of my advertising code - now storing all banners in new db tables, and tracking impressions and clickthroughs. I'll write this up in a few more days when more complete.

• Modified MailToList.asp - the file I use to email my newsletter to all the subscribers. The change to ASPMail and the list continuing to grow has led to the script taking longer than the default 90 second script timeout. To stop the script timing out I added a new line:
Server.ScriptTimeout=900; // set timeout to 15 minutes

• Not only the worst day ever (see below), but the best day ever too. The site got listed on LearnASP.com as a Top ASP site - Charles Carrolls site gets 22,000 visitors a day, so Im hoping the traffic improves...which means the site improves.

• Don Welsh was the first to point out that the database in the download didnt have the diary table! Its now fixed of course...

• Ken Reed pointed out a bug in the way that all the links work in the latest download. I added a tag recently to utils/Init.asp to define where the relative links are relative to.
By default it assumes you run from http://localhost/cya, but many of you dont. Ive now published an article about how to set this up - see BaseHref.asp.

No idea what happened - maybe a bit too happy with the find/replace?

Change C to 0xC on line 124 in DBEditRecord.asp
Add sSQL as a parameter to the Execute call in DBDeleteRecord.asp

• Previous Hero of the Week Don Welsh asked how to remove the need for a password in the database admin pages.

The answer is to change the line in utils/Init.asp:
�����bValidUser = Request.QueryString...
to:
�����bValidUser = true;

• Apologies to anyone who was on my site when I had to immediately and without warning switch to the new Windows 2000 server today. Hopefully no-one noticed since it was a simple IP address change on the same DNS server. Unfortunately the day after I uploaded the membership system my old server got blacklisted when spammers started bouncing email off it.

Although you can appeal, it wasnt going to be fixed anytime soon, so I quickly moved. Now the site uses ASPMail rather than CDONTS which my ISP thinks more secure against spammers.

• DownloadCYA.asp stated incorrectly that the configuration file (config.asp) is in the utils folder! Of course, it is really in the include folder. Thanks to Joe Hanover.

• Thanks to Jon Gelketka for pointing out that the download zip file was corrupt. This was probably caused by an upload that failed when using my flaky cable modem...