31 Aug
*CRASH*

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!


22 Jul
Middle of July? It's embarrassing how long it has been since I updated this diary (you'd call it a blog nowadays, but this pre-dates blogs!)

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. ;-)


1 Apr
I've just sent the emails off to Neilo and Hungvpin, the latest winners of my monthly contest. Neilo will receive a copy of SharpPower's RapTier and they both get a copy of the best ASP.NET yet published (still!). Don't worry though, RapTier is the prize this month too!

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!


3 Mar
Recently I needed to find a tool that allowed me to create PDF files containing the contents of a web page. Easy, right? I've seen the ads for PDF tools and the thousands of links that come up on Google - but what they don't tell you is that most don't work!

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.


1 Mar
I haven't heard from Jim Hole(?); the winner of the February contest, but Flavio Coelho from Brazil claimed the second prize from XHEO! Are you listening Jim?

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


2 Feb
Ok, no snickering, I passed my 40th birthday last week. No, I'm not that old, I'm still hoping it's a cruel and elaborate joke! I mean, I must be, oh, 28, 29 at most?

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!


1 Jan
Happy New Year! I'm looking forward to 2004 as being a very prosperous year for all of us here and at OurLittleNet. Business is good! Having just celebrated my 10th wedding anniversary a few days ago, and then purchased my wife a shiny new SUV yesterday we're certainly having fun here!

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...


1 Dec
Novembers contest was won by Bill Gowan and someone from www.Guiguy.com - and Decembers contest is now underway! The prizes remain the same; $499-worth of cool charting software from Steema Software and the latest edition of ASP.NET Unleashed from Sams Publishing.

5 Nov
Well, that didn't last long! I'm pleased to say that Steema Software have offered to provide the prizes for the next few months!

4 Nov
The two winners of October's contest were both previous winners! Shukie Lok from London and Darryll Ervin from Utah won the contest in May 2002 and February 2003 respectively!

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. ;-)


1 Oct
Lori won the September contest and a copy of White Cliff Computing's WebZinc.NET!

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!


5 Aug
I wanted to pass along news of the nicest component that I've come across in quite some time: ImageUtil by AmbientWare.

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!


23 Jul
How weird was that? I got up this morning to see emails from the web site telling me about a problem, and when I looked the site was reporting "Operation must use an updateable query". That's a common problem when you're setting up a new site (read more) but I've never heard of it "just happening"!

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...


20 Jul
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11 Jun
You heard it here first - Scott Watermasysk of ASP.NET WebLog fame is a really nice guy, and sharp as a tack. I got to look behind the curtain recently at his blog code and it is swee-eeet!

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.


1 Jun
Phil and Marlene won the May contest and will receive server licenses of the highly recommended 1 Click DB. I haven't yet had the time to chase up a June contest sponsor, so we'll take a month off!

7 May
I'd like to thank Wally McClure (www.ScaleableDevelopment.com) for helping me with a particularly nasty connection pooling problem I'm having with OurLittleNet. Turns out that the tool I'm using to track the problem (perfmon) is the thing with the bug in it!!

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


2 May
Check out RockLyrix.com - the latest to be added to the Mini-Me page. ;-)

30 Apr
April's contest, and a VisualASP license, has been won by Bob Woodard of Tampa, FL (his second win!) and "u92m". This month we're pleased to be giving away some more 1ClickDb licenses - one Pro and one Pro with source code!

24 Apr
Are there any strange people out there that have a copy of February 17th's Newsweek? Apparently I'm in there following a telephone interview with a journalist. Let me know if you're willing to send it to me!

15 Apr
I have a very good client that has new projects for me. Unfortunately, I don't have any spare time. If you have used the CYA code and want to earn some good money for integrating my membership system into a site, please let me know.
Update: the position has been filled!

11 Apr
It has been complete chaos this week and I haven't even posted last month's contest winners! Jos Ponet from Belgium won the first prize, but the second prize winner isn't responding. If I don't hear soon perhaps I'll re-assign the prize. ;-)

20 Mar
I came across a very generous (and topical) offer today that will appeal to my American readers. Street-Signs-USA will send you free American flag decals if you send them a stamped addressed envelope. Full details here.

1 Mar
February's contest closed last night, and thanks to WhiteCliff Computing there were three prizes to give away! WebZinc.NET will be sent to Josh Evitt from Nashville, Per Christian from Norway and Richard Whitehouse from Liverpool, England.

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.


12 Feb
I added a new snippet today, which may open the eyes of many webmasters out there. There is money at stake here!

Check out how I threw away my Google PageRank..


3 Feb
Continuing my praise of companies that offer exceptional service, here's another one. I haven't even bought this product, let alone received any kickbacks for saying this, but I had to tell you about Chris Townsend at AmbientWare.com.

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..


1 Feb
Darryll Ervin was the lucky winner of Advanced Intellect's awesome aspNetEmail component today!

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.


31 Jan
Check out the new section of the site - FREE trade publications for those who qualify! There is no catch - no obligation, trial period or purchase is necessary.

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


15 Jan
Many times you can buy similar products from many companies; web page compression is one such product. What makes you choose one over the other? Service.

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.


31 Dec
The last day of 2002, eh? I actually don't have anything planned (the kids are already in bed) so I'll leave it up to you reprobates to go out on the town and have a good time.

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!


6 Dec
How cool is ebates.com!?! I just purchased a new Dell Inspiron 8200 laptop (the first laptop I've owned, believe it or not) and friend Jeff Widmer told me to sign up at ebates first.

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.


30 Nov
Vincent and Rich E from New Jersey were the lucky winners of 1 Click DB Pro Source Code in November's contest. I use 1 Click DB exclusively on client sites and I highly recommend it.

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!


31 Oct
I just got back from taking my kids around the neighborhood and drew the winner of the October contest. Talk about spooky things happening on Halloween - Bill Gowan (the winner in March) won again!! Congratulations Bill, at least you won different prizes!

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!


12 Oct
I have published a much updated list of books, software and hardware recommendations in the new Library. If you're looking for the best books on ASP, ASP.NET, Marketing or just a seriously good read, this is the place.

7 Oct
XCompress rocks! On all the tests I have performed the site is consistently much faster to download and render in all the browsers I've tested (IE 5.5, IE 6.0, Opera 6, Netscape 6.2). Without doubt the cheapest and fastest way that I could have improved the performance of the site. Highly recommended.

5 Oct
XCompress is now installed, so please let me know if you see anything unusual! Does the site seem quicker? Let me know!

• 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.


29 Sep
The contest is back with my still-favorite ASP.NET book "ASP.NET Unleashed" and an awesome component never before offered as a prize.

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.


10 Sep
I started using SpamNet a week ago to detect and delete spam, and must say it is working very well.

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


23 Aug
Long-time visitors (friends?) Conan and Salman (of CSharpFriends.com) both pointed out that my little backup counter at the bottom left of the page is showing over a million visitors!

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!


21 Aug
New Proposal Kit Professional 5.1Amazing new release 5.1! The best just got better - Proposal Kit 5.1 is here with a lot of new material. Remember, this is the package that saved me 3 times the purchase price on the first day - as a freebie they include example legal documents that were going to cost me $600 to draft!

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


14 Aug
Interested in getting free products in exchange for doing some beta testing? I've just joined CenterCode after being recommended by a friend. I'll keep you updated if I'm chosen to evaluate anything..

6 Aug
I'm away on business in Denver this week, and it's beautiful here! I love the fact that it's as hot as Atlanta but with no humidity. Much nicer! It is weird that I almost fell over when I smoked my first cigarette here though - that lack of oxygen here in Mile High City has some unexpected side effects...

I'm going to give a presentation of Windows Forms, C# and the CLR this afternoon to the developers and some managers in my company, so that should be interesting. I hope I'm convincing enough that we can write new applications in .NET. Fingers crossed.

31 Jul
David Berry, a Microsoft MVP that I've known for some time now won the contest for July! The aspNetEmail component (written by good friend Dave Wanta and his Advanced Intellect company) is truly a great product. I use it on all my .NET sites, and it works perfectly straight out of the box. Not only that but it allows you far more control over your emails than I ever have had with any of the ASP email components I've used. I highly recommend it.

• 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.. ;-)


1 Jul
Shane Bauer from Baltimore, MD won the contest last night and gets a $500 license to the latest and greatest CodeCharge Studio and a book from Sams Publishing!

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.


29 Jun
Open-source has produced it's first real benefit to CYA readers - 1 Click DB Free is now integrated into the site. You now have two online database administrations tools to learn from - mine and a professional one. =;-)

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


20 Jun
Hehehe! I had to laugh today when I looked at my search engine listings to see who is linking to me. CodeProject featured for the first time in the top 20. What was funny (and you'll see what I mean if you follow this link) is that it's from an article about David Wulff's attempt to add a full-blown forum system to CYA. Check it out!

4 Jun
Behind the scenes things are happening. You just can't see them yet. The CoverYourASP open-source project at SourceForge is about 50% set up now, with a small group of volunteers in place to help with the admin. I'd like to thank Dave Kawliche, Aaron Robinson, Larry Brusatori, Mike Lynch and Shane Bauer for responding so quickly.

1 Jun
Shukie from London, U.K. was the winner of May's contest! We have a special prize for June - CodeCharge Studio is the latest version of the application builder that has huge improvements over the previous version!

31 May
I have updated the download of this site in preparation for the move to open-source. The next step is to upload it to the CoverYourASP project at SourceForge.Net. After that I will be setting up the selected project coordinators with admin rights to that project and we can get started!

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...


24 May
I'm famous-er! Check out my article that was published in aspnetPRO magazine this month. It looks even better in print! If you haven't seen the magazine yet, you should subscribe. It really is the best ASP.NET magazine I've seen, and you can receive a FREE trial issue.

23 May
UI usability and consistency is very important to me, so I was pleased when Ken Schiff introduced himself yesterday. Ken is also known as The GUIguy and for good reason - he's been improving UI's and training developers for years. If you have an application that needs a little tweaking, check out his site.

22 May
The search is over! Read "How I found a job (or four)"..

14 May
Just to keep you up to date, I heard that the CYA open source project was approved on SourceForge.Net yesterday, so there is (slow) progress being made. There is a LOT going on over the next few weeks though, so don't hold your breath.. ;-)

2 May
I need your help! As discussed in the latest newsletter, I'm exploring ways to open up CYA to you, the readers. I am making it open-source, and being a Microsoft junkie I haven't had any experience...

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...


30 Apr
Bob Woodard from Tampa, FL was the winner of the April contest, and has received the awesome Hexillion HexGadgets suite and my favorite book from Sams Publishing. Now the May contest is underway for a full license of iisCART2000!

23 Apr
Many of you have received email from "me" recently - unfortunately it's just a clever scam by the W32/Klez.h@MM worm. When someone is infected the worm sends itself out to everyone in their address book, using one of the addresses as the From address. So, if you know anyone infected that has me in their address book (and lots do) there's a chance you'll get an email looking like I sent it. Look at the email headers though and you'll see another From header - that's the real culprit. ;-)

19 Apr
I'd love to know why the traffic peaked so much today. Apparently someone linked to my AllContent page, and generated nearly 10,000 extra page views. As I write this (at 10:15pm) I saw over 26,000 today! If anyone wants to give me a clue, please drop me a line

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...


12 Apr
I really wish I had the time and energy this guy has! He spends his time suing spammers that send him junk - and he wins!

• 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!


10 Apr
I just had to apply the latest patch to my server - sorry if you noticed...

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. ;-)


9 Apr
Local boy comes good! Well, he's not local, but Salman Ahmed has been an avid CoverYourASP member since we were at 60,000 page views a month (that's a long time ago!). He's finally taken the plunge and created his own ASP.NET web site to teach C# - CSharpFriends.com. Go check out the work of another CYA alumni...and no comments about the orange...

8 Apr
Offering the Hexillion license again in this months contest reminded me that I don't tell you very often what an amazing resource their online utilities are. I use it almost every day to lookup URL's and find out who owns them or what their IP address is. Whenever a site seems to be down I always check the Domain Dossier to check if it's just me, or if no-one can see the site. Very highly recommended...

5 Apr
I like Steve Schofield of ASPFree.com. I met him for the first time at Microsoft recently (where we were visiting the .NET team) and he was one of the surprizes. You know how you imagine what the guys are like that run these big web sites? Well, most of them are just normal guys! We won't go into details of how he took me back to the hotel that night when I was so drunk I couldn't walk, or what I may or may not have done in his car, but suffice it to say that I made some good friends on that trip!

2 Apr
The unsung heroes. Absolutely!

• 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.


29 Mar
I just took a peek to see who has been collecting the most points in the latest contest (which ends on Sunday). A couple of people stood out, for various reasons! First 3 of the past winners are still coming back: Per Schulze, Innes Borkwood and Clint Clark!. Shukie is there of course - I don't remember ever talking to him(her?) but it's a memorable and easy-to-remember email address ;-)

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..


28 Mar
In partnership with FindSP.com I have added a new section to the site - Find yourself a host! If you're unhappy with the company that hosts your web site here is an excellent place to find a replacement...

27 Mar
Want to see what CoverYourASP looked like in November 2000, just 3 months after launch? I came across this cool archive site this morning that will let you see it. While you're there, take a look at the early (1996) Yahoo or Microsoft.com...

26 Mar
Don't forget the ASP.NET User Group meets in Atlanta tonight. I'm bringing a bunch of books kindly donated by Amy Sorokas at Sams Publishing to give away in the raffle...

12 Mar
Man, what a nightmare! I'm here at Microsoft all week and this morning the site decided to take a dump. I screenscrape ASPWire news and the scraping failed for the first time in months, crashing the front page of the site! There is no way to fix the problem from here - the firewall stops anyone uploading files! So I had to send a fixed file to my host to upload manually. Hopefully not too many of you were screwed up by this...
P.S. EverPlanet, my host, ROCK!! They fixed the problem 3 minutes after me emailing them the file...

10 Mar
I'm at Microsoft in Redmond visiting the .NET team all this week, so please forgive me if I don't return your emails promptly! It is going to be a lot of fun chatting to the ASP.NET team, although I may not be able to pass on much of the information that I overhear...

1 Mar
Conan (a long-time CYA supporter) asked me to mention another favorite site of his: CoolHomePages.com. I'd never visited before, but it's kinda cool. I'm going to spend some time browsing on there later. The site is full of links to amazing "cool" sites - a good place to start when looking for design inspiration. They have some kind of "please help support the site" going on, but get past that pop-up and it is worth a visit.

28 Feb
Another contest is over and another begun! Two winners were picked this time. Clint was the winner of the $950 Dundas Chart and ASP.NET By Example book, while Innes just won the book!

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!


20 Feb
Neil Holmes is an old friend that runs the VisualASP site to sell his very cool components. I certainly wouldn't consider writing my own - his are very cheap and well tested. Neil just revamped his site (hence this promotion) so now you have extra reason to check it out...

14 Feb
Fellow ASP Ace and all round good guy Dave Wanta has launched a very cool new web site: KBAlertz.com. This site crawls MSDN each day and sends you all the relevant new Knowledge Base articles that have been published - you simply choose which technologies you are interested in. Very cool!

1 Feb
Thanks for such a great January - it's wonderful to see the traffic climb so much in one month. It's a combination of two things, first the launch of XP caused me to write my very popular Can I run ASP on XP Home Edition? and then the launch of the .NET Framework SDK got everyone enthusiastic again. Traffic is up 25% to 430,000 page views a month now!

• 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).


31 Jan
If you are planning to attend just one conference this year, check out ASP.NET Connections in New Orleans. Start persuading your bosses now - the conference takes place during Jazz Fest!

30 Jan
I heard a very sad story at the weekend - John from WebDevelopers.com let me know that he is being taken to court by Internet.com over his domain name. Apparently, Internet.com registered WebDeveloper.com in February 1995 and John registered WebDevelopers.com and .net in May 1995. Remember, that's 7 years ago.

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?


28 Jan
A nice birthday present for me - my office is being closed! I've posted my resume today to a few web sites but please send me any leads you have for ASP, ASP.NET or C++ jobs in Atlanta, GA. Thanks!

26 Jan
Jans ASP Portal told me that CYA will be featured as their "Site of the week" in a few weeks, so I added him to my list of sites that link to me. Check it out!

23 Jan
Sams Publishing agreed to donate another book for this extra-long contest, so I'll be picking two winners this time. Only one will get the $950 Dundas component though. ;-)

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!


22 Jan
Please don't forget to join me at the Atlanta ASP User Group meeting next Tuesday, January 29th at 6pm. Stuart Dickerson will be talking on "Creating Web Serivces Using Visual Studio.NET". This is the first meeting at the new location, so be sure to check the details on the Atlanta ASP User Group website.

20 Jan
Rickard Olsson from Sweden just won the latest contest - and the next one is underway! This one is the best yet, with $1,000 worth of prizes!

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!


18 Jan
When Ben Hitchcock sent me a much modified and improved version of my Database Administration Tool today it got me thinking about my almost non-existent license again. I'd be very interested to hear your opinions on GPL and other public domain licenses, and whether my free code should use one. I certainly don't mind giving it away for free and others using it, but I don't want other sites publishing my code as their own. But what about modified code? Please, let me know your thoughts.

15 Jan
It's .NET day!! Microsoft just released the official .NET Framework SDK. This is the day I've been anticipating for a long time - now I can install it on my nice new machine. I hadn't wanted to install the beta release on a new computer, for obvious reasons. Now get over to MSDN and get that 131mb download!

13 Jan
I just got informed that CYA is website of the week over at ASP Experts. It looks like they recently had a complete makeover, so why not check them out?

11 Jan
There's an update to Can I run ASP on XP Home Edition? - Scott Mitchell let me know about a more detailed explanation of a workaround. Be aware that I do not recommend doing this lightly!

8 Jan
Gokhan Kayalibay started a chain of events a few days ago that culminated in a new Snippet: Can I run ASP on XP Home Edition?This wasn't the first time I've been asked, but this time I got a lot closer to the truth, and even spoke to David Berry, a Microsoft MVP, who told me Microsoft PWS is officially dead...Microsoft decided to discontinue it in favor of supporting IIS. XP [Home] owners will need to upgrade to XP Pro to use IIS.

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.


7 Jan
Another contest finished last night and a new one started. The winner was Blake Carr from Memphis who won over $600-worth of prizes! The new contest features the same book again (I love the ASP.NET Unleashed book) and the ever popular VisualASP components. Good luck!

6 Jan
Here's a link that James Harris forwarded me from his website. It's a neat page that you can download and install on your server that allows you to see which of the 170+ common components are installed. Like James says "Since many hosts never tell you when they install things for other customers, you can sometimes take advantage of what you find from this.". Check it out. (Of course, as Innes Borkwood pointed out, it may be temporary so at least tell your host you're using them...)

4 Jan
Edwin Lopez helped out a lot this morning by pointing out that you don't get the extra 5 contest points each time you visit the site. I "fixed" a bug a few weeks ago and failed to spot that side-effect. It's fixed now. Thanks Edwin

2 Jan
Back to work <sigh />. Actually, I'm looking forward to it since there are some hot new things planned for this year. .NET is nearly upon us, work is coming in thick and fast and it's all still great fun! I stepped back and made a list the other day and there are now five major new sites that I want to work on in the coming months, so it'll be a busy time. I'd like to wish you all a happy and prosperous 2002!

29 Dec
I'm driving to Kentucky for a few days (a state I've never been to, so it'll be interesting). So, you'll just get an "out-of-office" reply if you contact me. I'll reply when I get back next week.

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


27 Dec
I'm having serious problems with my mail server last night and this morning. I can receive emails, but cannot send them. The same problem happens on the site too, so if you've asked the site to send you email (by asking for your password or recommending the site to someone) then it may not have got through. My host is working on it but it's apparently a little bizarre! Thanks for being patient.

23 Dec
Just because we're all off for the holidays doesn't mean you shouldn't come and visit! The last contest just ended with Monte Foltz from South Dakota as the lucky winner, and the new contest is a doozy!

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?


19 Dec
Have you ever wanted to do web development work for others? I do, and one of the hardest aspects is drafting up the legal documents: Non Disclosure Agreements, Terms and Conditions, Development contracts and many others. Now I use the awesome Professional Proposal Kit 4.0, which includes everything you need to do web development work. You can easily create accurate price quotes and create very professional looking proposals with this toolkit. It is truly an amazing find - my attorney admitted that he couldn't write a single one of these legal documents (that come free) for the price of the entire package!

16 Dec
One too many people suggested that the text was too small on my articles today, so I made a little change to 216 files to add class="content" to the cell that the content is shown in on every page! Then I added a little CSS to utils/Init.asp to define td.content { font-size: 13px; } and hey presto, bigger text. Now whenever I want to change the content I can just change that line. Maybe I'll even allow you to set it as part of the site personalisation...

12 Dec
I got a funny email from Teresa Cannon this morning that I had to share. She said "I'm very impressed with your "day job" and the line on GPS products. Between day job and home hobby (CoverYourASP.com), do you ever have time for anything else (ie: family, fun)? PS - I had to get security at my company to allow me to use your site. It was because the name of the site is too close to the usual CYA! LOL"

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. ;-)


10 Dec
Per Schulze from Denmark was the lucky winner last night of the second contest. He gets a new book and the VisualASP Component Pack. The third contest is now underway. Incidentally, Per had 63 points in the contest.

7 Dec
I've been asked a lot lately what I do for my "day job". I'm a C++ programmer, working on a product for Land Surveyors and Civil Engineers - take a look...

6 Dec
People who set web crawlers onto my site aren't very clever, are they? Surely everyone knows by now that you can download the whole site and learn from it on your PC? Not only do they end up crawling my database admin pages (which generates thousands of HTML pages as it walks through my tables), they also lower my CTR (click through rate) on my ads! Since the ads pay for this totally free site that's important. ;-)

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..


29 Nov
Many of you have poked me about how easy it is to get points in the contest - just refreshing a page will increment them! I've started to add code to restrict the most obvious methods people are using, but I won't just tell you what I'm doing since you can view the relevant source code if you know where to look. Let the games begin... ;-)

25 Nov
Well, the first contest is over, and Oliver Mortimer of London, U.K. is the lucky winner! The second contest is now underway with a VisualASP license and another excellent ASP.NET book from Sams Publishing as the grand prize! Good luck!

23 Nov
Live in Atlanta? Don't forget to join me at the Atlanta ASP User Group meeting on Tuesday 27th. It's a very casual but interesting meeting - this week Andre Hazelwood will describe his experience building an ASP.NET site, and Maurice Cantrell of Microsoft will discuss ASP.NET's "Datagrids and other WebControls". I'll be giving away CYA mugs and stuff - others have nicer prizes for the draw!

21 Nov
I apologize if you were affected by the downtime this morning - yet again it was way upstream of my site. A couple of the major lines were out for a couple of hours - many sites were down.

• 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...



17 Nov
I have updated the download to include all the latest changes, including the contest code...

13 Nov
Thanks to Mark Rose for pointing out a limitation of the search code. I had previously removed special characters like % and ', but now I allow you to search for phrases that contain apostrophes. This and other changes won't be added to the download until this weekend...

• 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.


12 Nov
Spooky! Four of the top five members with the most points after the first 12 hours are called James! Weird.
I'm one of course (can't stay away) but I'm at a member level that doesn't count in the contest.
One member already has the maximum 500 points - did I happen to mention that the rules say that anybody found writing scripts to gain points will be disqualified? I'll be checking the logs later, but I'm betting that Jamie is the first offender! Good fun this, eh?!

• 
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...


5 Nov
I've noticed a lot of bounced emails in the last 24 hours, all with errors such as "Unknown host aol.com". Not very likely is it? Other domains affected are hotmail.com and home.com. I'm looking into the reason, but if you tried to become a member or are waiting for a reply from me, please be patient for a little while!

26 Oct
Conan pointed out the significance of my little counter at the bottom left of the page - it passed 500,000 today! That's the number of visitors to my site in the last year.

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!


22 Oct
I updated the download of this site last night, after a user found an interesting bug in the DB admin code. Read more...

11 Oct
One question keeps being asked, and the same thing is searched for over and over - where is the CoverYourASP forum? After mumbling for months, I've finally come clean with the answer in my latest snippet. There's also talk of a fan club, although I still find that hard to believe...

7 Oct
I've updated the downloads to include the latest source code on the site. Snippets are the latest addition.

3 Oct
In case you've ever wanted to find out where someone is from, given their zip or phone number, I found a neat site to do it. I needed to see where the area code 916 was the other night and found a cool utility on the MelissaDATA site...

1 Oct
I'm back, complete with Green Card! Now I can finally help all of you that have asked me to do contract work. Obviously there are a lot of emails to answer after my 10 days away, so please bear with me.

19 Sep
I'm outta here! Today I am flying to the UK with my family to pick up my Green Card - we're returning on the 29th. Please continue to send your emails, but obviously I won't be answering them until October! See you guys soon.

18 Sep
Sorry for the reboots today - the last was to install URLscan to get rid of those pesky hack attempts. There have been thousands of attempts on servers today, including mine. They were coming in at 10,000 per second at one point on a friends site...

17 Sep
My site is now running on a new dedicated server at EverPlanet. I hope you didn't notice anything bad, but if you did I apologize!

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.


15 Sep
Snippets are here! Snippets are mini-articles entirely stored in the database, which makes it much easier for me to manage them. Look down the front page and you'll see the new section. They are included in the search too, and I will quickly add snippets for any words that have no matches. The download does not include snippets yet - I'll try and get it done before we fly back to UK on Wednesday.

13 Sep
Although I have now put back my ads and taken down the black mourning ones, I've decided to donate the money I earn to the Red Cross. Feel free to do the same.

11 Sep
My deepest condolences to anyone affected by todays events.

9 Sep
Happy Birthday to me! CoverYourASP is one year old today - and what a great year it has been! To celebrate this I shall be adding a contest system this month and giving away some cool prizes. I shall also be launching my Snippets this month, which are very cool.

Thanks for your support over the last year everyone!


7 Sep
Charles Carroll kindly nominated me for MVP which would be cool. Wish me luck!

6 Sep
I had to add a few more tests to my 404 handler this morning - I got fed up with those new errors that browsers are coming up with now. If you get emails sent by your 404 handler like I do, you'll know. IE requests pages that don't exist when using File/Save as web page, so I now ignore requests that include "_archivos/", "_files/" or "-filer/". For more background, read my earlier article.

4 Sep
You IE6 users will be pleased to read this I'm sure! I finally threw up my hands in dismay and gave up trying to get IE6 to not crash when I display this diary in an iframe! I now just pull the last two entries from the database and display them on the front page. No scrolling I'm afraid, just a couple of links to more diary entries.

2 Sep
For anyone is using IE6, you'll notice that many sites look different now - sometimes a LOT different! IE6 renders table cells differently - the alignment of a cell (<td>) is now inherited from the "parent" cell when nesting tables. Previously a cell with no specified alignment would default to align="left". To get your pages to render the same in IE6, you'll have to specify the left alignment. I've been through the site and fixed a few places, but if you see any others, please let me know.

1 Sep
If you have thought of advertising at this site and the other 20 top-quality ASP sites that I sell ads for, check out the revised pricing. I now sell monthly slots too, and prices have been slashed!

31 Aug
August was a very good month! The long-awaited final interview for our Green Card (US permanent residency) has been scheduled, so very soon I will be able to sleep again knowing I can stay in the USA. It's been a long process - nearly 4 years!

30 Aug
Good things happen at bad times sometimes...here I am in Cleveland and I get an email saying that I have finally got a contract on my house after being on the market for 7 months or so (I've blanked the actual amount of time long ago). So, my cellphone doesn't work here and I don't have a fax to sign the contract. Like I said, good things sometimes happen at bad times.

29 Aug
I leave today to join ASPSmith's .NET training class in Ohio. Should be fun!

28 Aug
Thanks go to Ken Schaefer from the excellent adOpenStatic.com today for running my front page through an HTML validator and letting me know that I had an error on the page. Invisible in all browsers that I've tested, but I had </td><tr><tr><td> - can you see the error? Yet again proof that you should validate your pages regularly! Try this one.

27 Aug
Oh dear! IE6 has finally been released, and it has the same bugs in as the pre-release version. Which means that my site will crash your browser if I show this Diary on the front page. DISAPPOINTED!

8 Aug
I'm busy writing a new article this week - but not for this site! Paul Litwin, Editor-in-chief of the new asp.netPRO magazine, approached me last week and asked me to write for them. It's quite exciting being in print for the first time, but the 8/25 deadline is looming...

7 Aug
I've had to disable my credit card page temporarily while I re-consider how to set it up. In the last month I have been inundated with "authorization only" transactions where fraudulent people have been testing stolen credit card numbers there. Note that they're not giving me any money, just verifiying the card numbers, but even so I've had a lot of irate people contact me demanding the reason why my site was being used in this way!

6 Aug
Continuing to lay bare my darkest secrets...it turns out that the files I found were the result of a much older invasion of my home PC - not a recent hack at all. Since then I've reformatted a new drive and boot from that (the files were on an old hard drive in my PC), so the threat has long been eradicated. Still, it was sitting there for months, undetected. Now DSLreports.com gives my machine the highest security ranking possible!

5 Aug
In my last newsletter I described how I went for a month with no protection on my home PC until I got my new router. Well, it was long enough for something to get into my computer. Today I found 4 files in my C:\ - htm and asp pages that all displayed the same anti-US profanities! Oops. Please, if you haven't made your computers secure do it NOW. Use GRC.com or DSLreports.com to test...

25 Jul
I'm proud to announce a huge new section on CoverYourASP - jobs! Many of you have asked the best way to get yourself a job working with ASP - now you need look no further. Good luck!

24 Jul
It's a little late to mention this, but tonight is the Atlanta ASP User Group meeting - read all about it. Tonight Kenny Jones from Microsoft is talking about ADO.NET: Powering Data Access in ASP.NET Applications. See you there?...

20 Jul
Fancy a pair of boxer shorts with the CoverYourASP logo? Thought not! But if you did, you could buy some at the CoverYourASP store! Get your mugs, mouse mats, T-shirts here too...

16 Jul
Many thanks to the Rene Lariviere and Mark Johnson who reported that their IE6 crashes when visiting my front page. It turns out that some (but not all) versions of IE6 don't like the iframe that this diary appears in! For now I have disabled the diary for IE6 users, but to see if it crashes for you you can append ?ShowIE6 to the URL, or click here.

15 Jul
The site had some serious problems this weekend! Starting Friday PM the site was down almost all weekend - with only 300 page views by 7pm Sunday you understand the enormity of the problem. My mail was probably bouncing too, so if you sent me one please send it again. Sorry!

14 Jul
New banners and buttons to link to me are now available.

13 Jul
Planning is continuing for the planned sister site to this one - CoverYourASP.NET. I am writing it in C# - an exceptional language. To follow along I whole-heartedly recommend that you get this book. It has already jumped to the top of my "favorite books" list: Inside C# by Tom Archer.

12 Jul
My parents are flying into Atlanta tonight to stay with us for a few weeks - just warning you that email responses may be a little "sluggish" for a couple of days. =;-)

• 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.


10 Jul
Ooops! I awoke this morning with a nasty feeling that I'd forgotten something, so I checked the site. Sure enough I completely forgot that I was due to publish a newsletter last weekend. Sorry.

7 Jul
I'm so pleased with ASP.NET! Users familiar with my code will be too - since it just continues on from what I do with no render blocks and classes for everything. It'll be a while before you see anything because I have to create the site and page structure first, but I'm working on it...

6 Jul
It's a big red-letter day today - I start work (finally) on CoverYourASP.NET! I have a day off, the wife and kids are visiting friends. The Cable Guy is coming this morning too to install my cable modem in my new house after a long wait, so it's all coming together at long last. Ready, Set, Go!

4 Jul
Happy 4th July! I have to keep my head down at the local parade (I'm English, remember?) but the kids are really looking forward to it...

2 Jul
New site source code uploaded! I'm happy enough with the new layout to update the download. I've made a few changes to improve matters on NS 4.7 and Opera 4, but since 96% of you use IE (on my site), that's good enough for me. Have fun!

30 Jun
I can't remember if I've told you about HitBox Doctor before - but if you're serious about your website you need to visit. They check for broken links, bad HTML, load time and meta tags - and have a built-in image reducer. It's all free!
I use it regularly - in fact I cut out over 5k from my front page by running the new logo and table graphics through their optimization!

• 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"...


29 Jun
I'm glad I had 3 copies of Interactive Week to read last night - I installed the .NET Beta 2, or at least tried to.
  • Uninstalling Beta 1: 1 hour
  • Installing Component Update: 1.5 hours
  • Installing Visual Studio.NET: 1.5 hours until I hit a bad file on my CD.
This is HUGE! I shall burn a new CD tonight which will hopefully let me continue (my machine is patiently sitting at home, saying "Error reading file, Retry?", waiting for my return tonight).

27 Jun
Continuing the improvement of the site appearance (and after being given a needed push by Minella Gjoka!) I've added something else that I always wanted - a "Printer-friendly page" option that shows nothing but plain-jane content - find it on the left of the screen. I'm still amazed how easy it is to add this type of thing...

26 Jun
Can this be true? I'm as pro-MS as it's possible to be, but I don't like this smart-tags idea as it's described here!

• 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.


25 Jun
To celebrate doing this for a year I had a little re-design this weekend (as if you didn't notice). I have yet to go through every page though, so I suspect you may see a few that need tweaking! Hope you like it...
Note: The download has not been updated with this code - I'll post here when that's done.

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.
Anyway I'm feeling inspired to do a complete re-design...

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?

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.

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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

8 Jun
Like a good scare, or think you know this internet stuff? You should read Steve Gibson's article on grc.com about the Distributed Denial Of Service (DDOS) attacks against him by a 13 year old. It'll take you an hour to read, but afterwards you might be surprised how little you know. I was.

7 Jun
For those of you following the progress of my new site - ASPRSS, being launched on June 18th - I have now published the source code that enables you to create your own RSS XML file. It is available in VBScript and JavaScript in this zip file, and documented here.

6 Jun
Thanks Alalia! Seems Alalia Lundy got the honor of GirlGeek of the Week from GirlGeeks.com - and then listed CoverYourASP as one of her favorite sites. Cool. ;-)

1 Jun
Quite often I get emails like the one this afternoon concerning email validation:

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!


29 May
A reader, J de Silva, published a kind review of me and my site today - I took a look and was very impressed by his, so you should check it out. I love the design - one to watch.

25 May
Do you have the Alexa toolbar installed? If you do, beware. I did until recently but there is a side-effect you should be aware of if you are a web developer. If you upload pages to your server to test them and think it's safe because they aren't linked to from anywhere - think again. The Alexa toolbar is listening, and will happily cache your "private" file and crawl it whenever it fancies...

23 May
Check out the new easy access to all of Aspin.com's resources at the bottom of the page. I've moved over the ASPWire content to make room. Now you never have to leave my site... ;-)

22 May
The Cable Guy gave me some bad news today - there is too much signal drop over my 600 foot drive to get a cable modem. So I have to use a dial-up connection for 2-4 weeks while they prepare to dig up my drive. Anyway, the good news for you is that I can now tell you how to run my site with a dial up (I could never test it before)! When asked to "Connect" or "Stay offline", choose "Connect". Then, when prompted to dial-up, choose "Work offline". It's a pain, but that's the only way to run ASP with a dial-up. Or, of course, you could just stay online... ;-)

18 May
OK, I'm back. The new house is beautiful and there's even something for you too - there is a new item on the navigation bar above. Directory takes you to a huge list of resources provided by Aspin.com!

16 May
It's moving day in the Shaw household, so I won't be responding to any emails until Friday 18th - wish us luck!

15 May
ActiveServerPages.ca has had a major re-write, and very kindly included a special "CoverYourASP" section dedicated to my articles. Check them out!

14 May
As a follow-up to my "Accepting credit cards on your site" article, I'd like to say how pleased I've been with Charge.com. Just as I hoped, they have been remarkably helpful and efficient. I'd also like to thank those sites that have signed up through my link - a cool $200 check turned up today for two successful referrals!

13 May
I apologize but I failed to update every file in the download - so the include/config.asp was missing the new bDisplayAllianceBanners variable. You would have seen an error about this when running the site. The download is fixed now.

12 May
Check out the improved database administration - now you automatically get dropdown lists from foreign keys!

10 May
Lovely email from "Steve Anderson" (no email address given) - it made me smile: If you're going to be a professional writer, you should learn to spell 'independent'. Who said anything about professional?!! Did you pay me anything? I've fixed the single mistake needless to say. ;-)

9 May
What a waste of an evening! My wife received one of "those" emails today in her Outlook Express, and surprisingly the preview pane executed the script! I'm so used to my Outlook 2000 stopping me from doing virtually anything with attachments that I assumed Express did the same. Wrong! If you use Express, make sure you set Tools/Options/Security/Restricted sites zone.

4 May
Dave Kawliche was kind enough to link to CYA from his new site - but he wanted a non-animated button. So there's now a simpler button for you to use on the link page. You should check out Dave's site, AccessHelp.net, for lots of interesting information.

3 May
I found a new directory last night - Hytes.com - which had been kind enough to add my banner to the ASP pages. Check them out!

2 May
For your information, STORS.net is now STORS.org. There is now sample code available (in JavaScript of course!) for both publishers and directories to start supporting the STOR standard for sharing their resources.

30 Apr
Since I've been spending so much time on STORS lately, I've decided to make my newsletter bi-weekly so that there will be enough content to keep it interesting! So after the one sent out this morning it will be two weeks before the next one...

21 Apr
Slight change of plan this week - the newsletter will go out Sunday night / Monday morning instead of Saturday...

17 Apr
I've been documenting some classes I wrote at my "day job" recently - and I needed a way to easily create and edit flowcharts. I ended up deciding on SmartDraw. I liked it so much that I added it to my recommended resources. Check it out...

15 Apr
There's a new "mini me" in town. Arthur told me about his new CoverYourASP-based site - it's the best yet! See The New Zealand Biker on the MiniMe.asp page. Remember, your site could be on here too...

• 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...


14 Apr
Here's a quick way to view the latest newsletter - click the Newsletter link on the menu bar. There's now a link there to all the archived copies...

13 Apr
I just realized that it's Friday the 13th, which explains the trouble this morning! Apparently a provider upstream from my server has been very slow for the last few hours - to those of you affected I'll apologise on their behalf. It seems back to normal speed now.

12 Apr
There have been quite a few hits from people clicking on a link in an email today - and of course I have no idea what the email might be about, or who it was from. If anyone knows of an email from another site that mentions CoverYourASP please let me know so I can thank them!

11 Apr
I've added a new section to the front page today - suggested articles. Existing members can see it by personalizing the front page...

• 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!


10 Apr
I just uploaded a new set of source code for the first time a couple of weeks (vacation, remember?!!) - quite a few very small improvements: stopped spiders indexing or following links from the database administration pages (because they spend hours indexing 1000's of pages as they scroll through the database tables!); I now show "[Anonymous]" in the tell-a-friend email if no name is entered and a few other really small things. In fact the zip files are more up to date than the site for once, since they contain a slightly re-designed site with the affiliate links moved to the bottom of every page...

9 Apr
Welcome to all the LockerGnome readers who are visiting the site today! I recently re-subscribed to their newsletter after a few years away, then realized that I now had something others might want to know about! It looks like it'll be a very busy day for my server...

7 Apr
Thanks to the anonymous user who pointed out that the link to the source code of utils/database.asp was broken on the Server Side Includes page. That's now fixed, and I now get emails when similar things happen - my ShowSource.asp page doesn't show files that don't appear in its switch statement just to give me the option of hiding some files on my site!

6 Apr
I'm back! I had an excellent time, but response time may still be a little slow to your emails - I have over 600 to sift through... ;-)

29 Mar
OK, I'm outta here! The site will be running unattended for a week while I go and sit on a beach in Florida! Have fun everybody...

28 Mar
The new banners are here. If you're kind enough to use one of my old buttons or banners to link to my site, please update them.

27 Mar
OK, the next stage in the development of this site is almost here. Firstly, take a sneak peek at the new look for the site that is nearing completion. Secondly, I finally took the time to install Visual Studio.NET and the .NET framework, so it's full steam ahead with re-learning everything I know! Mmmmm, now which language shall I write the new CoverYourASP.NET site in? It won't be VB, but I'm still torn between JScript.NET and C#. Perhaps you'd like to vote?

23 Mar
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.

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


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/.

• 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...


21 Mar
Came across a new site today - ASPERS.NET. Lots to see, including a new ASP resource similar to Aspin.com.

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!"

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!

17 Mar
Don't forget, the newsletter I just sent out is also available to read on the site on my archives page.

16 Mar
I don't know if I should be proud or embarrassed by this, but the zip file that contains the entire site's source code (download it here) is now over 500,000 bytes. I really need to split it up into applications like banner system, membership, database admin, etc. but remember this is all done after work!

15 Mar
It's nice when the "establishment" starts using your code - Steven Smith at ASPAlliance (one of the oldest ASP sites around) sent me a note about my anti-spider code that I use to stop advertisers paying for spider clickthroughs. He now uses it too!

14 Mar
I've just added a new user-agent to the list that are redirected to my JustDownload.htm page. "WebFountain" hit my site a few times this morning doing things that no human would do, but I can find out nothing about it! I've searched everywhere. In the end I just added it to the sCrawlers array in the RedirectSpiders( ) function in utils/Init.asp. If anyone can shed light on WebFountain please let me know!

13 Mar
Today I'm celebrating 1,000,000 page views from over 200,000 visitors since the site opened 6 months and 4 days ago! I think that's pretty cool. My goal, which sounds a little unrealistic but I'm told isn't, is to grow to 1,000,000 page views a month by my first year anniversary!

12 Mar
I just added a cool tip of the day to my rotating banners on the right. The tip is supplied by SitePoint - an excellent resource for webmasters. You can always see it at the bottom of my resources page...

6 Mar
Apologies to any AOL users out there. I've just discovered (actually my wife did, and moaned at me) that my shared mail server has been blacklisted because of some rogue usage. Which is why so many AOL newsletters bounced at the weekend. Hopefully it will be resolved within the next 24 hours.

5 Mar
Many questions that I get asked are answered on the site, if only you could find the correct page! To help me answer these questions, and to promote my Search tool, I've added a few lines into utils/Search.asp. Even though normally form-driven I can now pass in the search expression in the URL - this allows me to email people a link to the search results. For example, going to Search.asp?Banner Application will act just as though you'd typed that into the search form. All I had to was add these lines:
   // get data from querystring
   var sSearch = unescape ( '' + Request.QueryString );
   // get data from form
   if ( !sSearch.length )
      sSearch = '' + Request.Form ( 'SearchText' );
   if ( sSearch != 'undefined' )
      //show search results

4 Mar
Since my site grew wider recently the ASPWire news section at the bottom of this page looked a bit odd, so I improved it this morning. Take a look, it's now two columns. You can see the updated source code for the MFC application that gets me this news feed in my article.

• 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!


3 Mar
Lots of newsletter subscribers missed their newsletter this morning. Home.com in particular were playing up again - mails bounced with "Unknown user" when I know it isn't true! Anyway, I'll put all the newsletters on the site this week - so you can browse all the way back to the very first one-liner...

27 Feb
If you want an example of the power of SQL (the language, not the database) take this example. I wanted to display an approximation of the number of days left for an advertisers banner if impression and click rates continued. To do this I used this SQL:
SELECT Round(([ClicksLeft]/[ClickRate]*100.0)*([EndDate]-[StartDate])/TotalImpressions,0) AS DaysLeft FROM BannerStats
Pretty cool, huh?

26 Feb
In recent weeks I have been getting more and more returned newsletters because the subscribers mail systems have been detecting the script in my newsletter, and refusing to deliver it to the subscriber. Although this is a laudable idea, my newsletter is not HTML, and no script will be run on your computers! Each of the sysadmin's I have contacted agree, but say that the software they use does not distinguish between executable scripts and articles about script. Sorry!

23 Feb
I added a new feature to my ShowAd() function in utils/Banner.asp. This normally gets called to display the next available banner, but I've now added the ability to send in the name of a banner to display. This means that on certain pages I can always show a relevant banner. A good example is my new credit card article where you will always see a banner for charge.com - my merchant account provider.

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


22 Feb
Thanks to Al Margheim for pointing out that my site didn't allow its text to be resized by the browser. I had used the CSS "font-size: 11px" which always remained fixed. Now I have changed it in utils/Init.asp to "font-size: 70%" and you can now resize using View/Text Size...

21 Feb
I came across a cool idea offered by Amazon.com today, and I couldn't resist adding it! I added this new rotating banner so you can quickly and easily help support my site...

• 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...


19 Feb
I just reserved the second space down in the right column for advertisers who prefer 125x125 or 130x110 sized banners. Thanks to Shawn Jackson of ActionJackson.com who was the first to take the space!

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


17 Feb
Please welcome a new sponsor: /n software.
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.

16 Feb
Had a little re-design last night - I made the site 800 wide rather than 640. Very, very few of you are using 640 resolution, and I need the right column bigger for 130 pixel banners for my advertisers! Hopefully everyone agrees this is a better use of your screen though... please let me know if you see something that doesn't "look right" now.

15 Feb
People have asked about the server the site runs on - it's a dual Pentium III 600, 1 GB ram, Raid 5 10K rpm drives with 4MB cache on each drive. Raid controller has 32MB cache. It runs Windows 2000, IIS 5 and I share the server with 120 other sites. It uses ASPMail for email and Access 2000 for database.

14 Feb
I've added another page in the troubleshooting section, this time explaining what to do when you get a JScript compilation error '800a03ea'...

• 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!


13 Feb
Last night I made a simple change that dramatically improved the speed that my pages loaded. Should have thought of it before really. The SiteMeter counter that I use was inside the <table> that my page displays in, so browsers couldn't render the table until the image was generated. Just by moving it outside the table the whole page still appears instantly even when SiteMeter are down. Changed utils/Footer.asp

• 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... ;-)


12 Feb
Please welcome a new sponsor: CodeCharge.com.
They have developed a "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."

11 Feb
As the site's popularity continues to accelerate, I passed the 1,000 subscriber to the newsletter today. Thanks to everyone for wanting to stay in touch!

6 Feb
I've added a new flag to config.asp - bStoreStats - that controls whether I store statistics about people visiting the site.

• 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, '' );


5 Feb
All my work has been offline this week, but I did notice something that made me laugh out loud...has no-one noticed that I'd used length="20" in my forms to set the length of the inputs? There's no such attribute - it should be size="20"!! I only made the mistake once, then copy and pasted it everywhere else...don't we all make silly mistakes? ;-)

2 Feb
Come on everybody, get voting! Click on my new catchy random rotating incentives on the right. What I really need are some cheerleaders up here...got any spare?

1 Feb
A few of you have noticed that you cannot sort the BannerStats table by the BannerID field. That's because I use an INNER JOIN to another table with that field also, so my generic ORDER BY generates an error: "The specified field 'BannerID' could refer to more than one table listed in the FROM clause of your SQL statement". Since this error is only caused by the way I hide the real content of that table, I now simply ignore your request to sort by that field.

• 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.


31 Jan
Seems quiet this week, but I've been beavering away behind the scenes! Tonight I will finish the manual indexing of all the keywords in my articles, and tomorrow you will finally be able to search the site!

30 Jan
I improved the DBEditTable.asp page today - just two small changes, but they make a lot of difference! First, You can now sort the table by any field by clicking on the field name. Clicking again will toggle between ascending and descending. The second change was just to wrap the code with a try...catch to trap errors caused by the query.

29 Jan
Just so that you know, I'm busy reviewing every page of every article on the site and typing in keywords for the search functionality due out by the end of the week. I may still implement the HTML search too (see my survey), but the keywords will come first. And, I want you to know that it's hard work...;-)

27 Jan
Apologies to the newsletter subscribers - I got two copies this morning, so I assume you did too! Since I only sent it once this time, I'll have to do some investigation...

25 Jan
Touched over 70 files again today - improved the breadcrumbs on the multi-page articles so that you could jump to the start of the article, and found an amazing HTML error - I use &#0149 all over the site for my bulleted lists, but it should be &#0149;...oops!

• 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!


24 Jan
I enhanced (my still undocumented) exception handling in utils/Database.asp a lot tonight. Now you get much more help when you get ADO errors when first setting up the site on your computer. And if the real site ever gets an exception when connecting to the database I get sent an email. I will write an article on exception handling this week.

• 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.


23 Jan
Hakan Eskici just pointed out a potential problem with the code that ignores IP addresses. It was "possible" to ignore an IP address that needn't have been. Note that advertisers would have got more free clicks, not less, so no-one's complained...;-)

• 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( ).


22 Jan
It took me a long time, but I finally found out why "once a day" scripts were sometimes happening more than once a day! My Banner reports page refreshed the Application variables containing the banners whenever clicks were moved between banners by an advertiser. How? By setting Application('BrandNewDay')=1 !! (see LimitIP.asp for an explanation). It is now fixed...

21 Jan
Had to take the site offline for a few minutes this morning, then the T lines went down for 4 hours...Sorry! The problem was upstream, not with my ISP.

• 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...


19 Jan
I moved the IncrementArticleCounter( ) function from utils/footer.asp to utils/init.asp today. Many people are clicking through to other pages before all the images have loaded, so the article counts were lower than they should be.

• 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..


18 Jan
Mike Robinson wrote in about a "Permission denied" when sending email with CDONTS. I've now documented that problem in a new "Email" section of the Trouble shooting page

• 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.


16 Jan
FYI - Mails sent to home.com have been bouncing since Saturday, so if you're missing your newsletter, or can't subscribe or join as a member, now you know why. Many email discussions lists are discussing the problem, but it's definately home.com's problem...

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


15 Jan
Code Updated: Improved Handle500100.asp - it now appends the Referrer, IP address and User agent (browser) to the email that it sends me.

• 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.


14 Jan
Added a few enhancements for my advertisers - Banners by day now include totals, and a link to the page is now available on Member Services for advertisers to click on.

13 Jan
Started adding some links to external resources on the Trouble shooting page. If I can't help you, someone here can...

12 Jan
Thanks for the best traffic ever yesterday - nearly 10,000 page views. Looks like this will be a good month! Any advertisers out there listening?

11 Jan
Mark Briscoe made a suggestion that I've now implemented. The contact and Tell-a-friend pages now have a link back to the page you were on originally.

• 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...


10 Jan
Some of you have been getting errors when attempting to save a record in the BannerStats table - that's now fixed.

9 Jan
As part of the roll-out of the Silver members-only area, I realized that Member Services wasn't available unless you were signed in! Without knowing the benefits of membership there wasn't much incentive to join, so I removed that limitation.

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


8 Jan
Arthur Flintoff suggested an obvious and easy change, which I've made this morning. The Contact, Subscribe and Tell-a-friend pages all pre-fill the form with the members information if signed in.

6 Jan
After deleting another 20 or so bounced email addresses from my mailing list this morning, I changed the subscription page so that no email addresses are added until the email address is confirmed!

5 Jan
The new HTTP 500 handler installed this week has found numerous errors that you guys have been getting, but not telling me about (tut,tut)!
The latest required changes to DBEditTable.asp, since it didn't even allow you to view any records in the BannerStats table. Now fixed!

4 Jan
Quick! Go straight to the results page of the ASP Guild's annual Top ASP Site award. As of 7:58am EST, CoverYourASP is in the lead! It can't last of course, the other sites have 50 times the traffic that I do, but it's fun having my 15 seconds of fame...

3 Jan
Another milestone reached today - my 100,000th visitor!

2 Jan
Fixed two errors in BannerReports.asp - asking to view a Banner By Day report for dates where no data was available would cause an ADO error, and the date/month were backwards! It worked where it was obvious, say 29/12/00, but not when it wasn't, like today, 1/2/01!!

• 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!


31 Dec
Happy New Year and best wishes for a successful and prosperous 2001!

30 Dec
Found another spider crawling the site this morning - HTTrack has now been added to the list of user agents shown the JustDownload.htm file..

27 Dec
Modified BannerCounter.asp - it now always increments the clickthrough counter, but doesn't decrement the ClicksLeft if it is a duplicate IP address or unknown browser. See the article if you have no idea what I'm talking about...

25 Dec
Happy Christmas everyone!

22 Dec
BannerReports.asp now allows advertisers to move clicks they have purchased from one banner to another. Only advertisers can see their stats now - but the rest of you can see some dummy ones - check it out!

• 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.


20 Dec
Modified ShowDiary.asp so that it shows just the last months worth of entries by default. There is a new link at the bottom to show the entire diary - scroll down and see!

• 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!


19 Dec
Changed the advertising model completely. Rather than the boring same-old model of CPM rates, I now charge by clickthroughs only - you don't get the traffic, you don't pay! Don't worry about spiders either - you only pay for IE and Netscape clickthroughs! more...

• 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.


18 Dec
Updated the database admin pages today, specifically DBEditTable, DBAddRecord and DBEditRecord. I noticed that I hadn't coped with adding/editing records that contained single quotes.
To display data containing quotes, I now call Server.HTMLEncode.
In SQL statements I used the regular expression sData.replace ( /\'/g, '\'\'' ) to change single quotes to 2 single quotes..

17 Dec
Advertising is here. Slipping in at the top of my ASP resources on the right-side of every page, there is now a single spot for advertisers. Watch this space for the implementation of an ad-serving system...

13 Dec
Robert Litz found another bug - this time in the deprecated ArticleAdmin.asp. There should have been a call to LookForMagicWord - see Security.asp for more details on this function.

12 Dec
Improved the MemberServices page - you can now subscribe/unsubscribe from the newsletter with a OneClick! (Sorry, Amazon.com). Thanks for the suggestion Hakan

9 Dec
Robert Litz pointed out that my DBAddRecord.asp page didnt work with tables whose fields contained spaces. I now wrap the field names in [ ].

• 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


6 Dec
Murat emailed me this morning - he found that the Show Source icon was a bad link on the Forgotten Password page.

3 Dec
Mark Briscoe pointed out that ResultsPage.asp has a little error in it. The QueryString of the mailto: URL didnt have a leading ? so didnt work as expected.

29 Nov
Serious problems here this morning. I lost the entire database - members, newsletter subscribers, everything. I would like to say it was lightning or some other act of god, but it wasnt. I was using a new FTP program and hit the wrong button - and uploaded an old corrupt database over the live one. Big oops. I hadnt backed up the database for 3 days, so all memberships and subscriptions to my newsletter since then have been lost. Sorry folks.

• 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.


26 Nov
I wanted to make the default front page smaller for non-members, so I turned off the diary and whats new. I also added a new page - AllContent.asp - that displays everything that the front page doesnt, so members or non-members can both see all the content. This reduced the non-members page from 25k to 14k!

• 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.


25 Nov
Found a bug in utils/login.asp - I was reading the personalization flags into the wrong variables, so when you signed in the next time your settings would look wrong.
In fact whats stored in the database is correct, and you should now see what you asked for. If you are signed in as I write this (13:30EST) then sign out and sign in again to see the fix.

23 Nov
I found that I had uploaded a page still very much under development! DBAddTable.asp wasnt supposed to be released yet - and it is a long way from working. If you got it in an earlier download, please disregard it. A real one will be coming soon.

21 Nov
A few people pointed out there were some errors in the database admin code. Both DBEditRecord.asp and DBDeleteRecord.asp had strange typos in them that werent in the files a few weeks ago (I checked).

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.


20 Nov
Columns.asp bug fixed - Toni Lipp pointed out that the code crashed if the sub-category descriptions were less than 50 characters long!

• 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...