Saturday, March 15, 2003 - Sat, 15 Mar 2003

Today, its back to customized BroadBoard for Behold’s Discussion Forums. Had to add Behold headers, move around a bit of the information on the page to the way I like it; get the pages to use the full-screen. Decide on fonts and sizes and colors; restructure. Bit by bit, I’m getting there. This job is sort of like sculpting an elephant out of ice. The method is simple. Chip away anything that doesn’t look like an elephant and you’ll get your elephant.

Now I’m down to putting in a page counter. I’ve got them in all my .shtml pages using Server Side Includes and calling the customized counter program I wrote. But this has been a problem for the few ASP pages I’ve made up to now. I have not yet found a way to get a simple text counter on an ASP page. They don’t accept my own counter program. So again, I did some research, and found some ASP code to open a dataset, read from it and write a number to it, and close it. After a couple of hours and about 60 tests, I had it! Now I feel great! This is something I’ve wanted to do for years, but had never got the general idea down.

While doing this in-depth, I just realized: ASP (Active Server Pages) is not a language unto itself. It is actually just Microsoft Visual Basic Script that is processed by the Server to act as a pre-processor for HTML code. Wow! That’s one big misconception out the window. I don’t know much Visual Basic, but the stuff I need for customization is relatively easy.