Wednesday 29 September 2010

ASP: Do you like cookies?

   


People don't like cookies, antivirus and anti spyware applications hate tracking cookies, everybody is scared to death by cookies. In the end they are just cookies... maybe poisoned cookies, maybe just valuable in some situations. If you're dealing with local web applications, you might find the use of cookies quite interesting, especially when you need to store temporary information such as log-in user name or date stamp.

Monday 27 September 2010

ASP: Scripting.FileSystemObject... how to move, copy and delete a file or a folder

   


The Scripting.FileSystemObject object is very handy when dealing with files or folders on the server. Imagine to have an asp page displaying the content of a folder, the user will be able to manage the folder and its content quite easily.
The FileSystemObject allow to access all information regarding a file (creation date, size, name and so on) and to execute simple operations on the file itself.
Ok, in this post I will concentrate on move, copy and delete operations, but in the future I plan to explore other methods.

Friday 24 September 2010

Use Feedburner & BuzzBoost to create a printable blog

   



After creating the blog you're reading, I wanted to create a printable pdf version of it. I searched for automatic online/offline conversion tools without satisfaction. Some apps are good but not customizable, or sometimes the result was not what I wanted. Then I decided to try another way.

Wednesday 22 September 2010

SQL Server: connect to an Acucobol database with AcuODBC

   


In a SQL Server environment you can connect to external databases using ODBC. You can actually connect to any external database, but I will explain how to use AcuODBC to link an Acucobol database.

Monday 20 September 2010

Exchange server: ExMerge

   


When dealing with Ms Exchange Server, you don't always find a ready solution to problems. One of the most useful application you might need is ExMerge (Microsoft Exchange Server Mailbox Merge Wizard).
ExMerge is a small program that you might not use for months, but it's worth knowing how to use it before things go wrong.
It can extract data from mailboxes on your server for backup or maintenance purposes. I actually use it when someone leaves the company: after a while, I extract all the mailbox folders and save them as a .pst file, then delete all the items and close the user account.

Friday 17 September 2010

JavaScript: create a popup window and update parent on close

   


I use popup windows rarely because most of today browsers try to block them. However sometimes they are handy and - let me say - beautiful. I've used them in a web application where detail information of a record are displayed and modified through a popup. In this situation, what I needed was to open the window in the centre of the screen and to update the parent window when the popup is closed.

Wednesday 15 September 2010

VBScript: How to check if a file exists on a remote server

   


As a web site developer, I sometimes need to check if a specific file exists on a remote server. That is easily done with the ServerXMLHTTP object. As explained by Microsoft MSDN, it retrieves XML responses from a server. If you use the object to read the head of a specific url and then check its status, you will be able to determine the file existence.
Let's try to write the code!

Monday 13 September 2010

Development and programming: is coding dead?

   


After reading and answering questions on programming forums, I always wonder why people are getting so lazy. I understand that the way we write web sites or web application code has really changed in the last few years, but I still don't understand why programmers (or pseudo programmers - I'd say) don't want to write code directly and often search for quick and ready-to-use solutions. I do understand that some add-ons, plug-ins, frameworks and libraries are really useful (and I wrote about it in the post regarding jQuery), but it seems to me that the art of coding is really dying.

Friday 10 September 2010

Dynamic keywords and description meta tags

   


After publishing the "Are keywords and description attributes useful?" post, I will explain how to create dynamic keywords and description meta tags. If you have a dynamic page which, for example, retrieves records from a table, according to query parameters, it is quite easy to populate the meta tags with relevant keywords or a description strictly related to the recordset itself.

Wednesday 8 September 2010

Are keywords and description attributes useful?

   


There was a time when keywords were very important in web sites promotion and ranking. The way search engines spiders considered the content of a page for ranking and appropriate search matching, was strictly related to keywords. But then, many webmasters thought that filling up long lists of not so much related keywords to their pages, helped them to get a higher ranking. When I say "not so much related", I mean that sometimes a good and sexy word could really draw traffic. Webmasters used to look for popular keywords and add them to their pages, regardless that they were consistent or not with the content of the page itself. And so, starting from 1999, search engines have gradually stopped looking for them and stopped considering them. At least most of them (it actually seems that Yahoo is still using them in conjunction with the real page content).

Monday 6 September 2010

Blog Ranking (part 2)

   


This is the second part of the series... and God only knows how many parts will there be. The first post (Google Blog Ranking... is it true?) was about Google and what people usually suggest in order to improve blog ranking. A month has passed and I think I can add some new thoughts on the matter.

Thursday 2 September 2010

Simple lightbox effect with jQuery

   


There are many lightbox effects available on the web. They may or may not use frameworks like jQuery, they might be in pure css or made in any way you want it. The one I will explain here is very - very! - simple and uses a mix of css styling and jQuery.