Tonya.me.uk - The story.

I wanted this area to have a list that you could look through then pick an entry to view. Once you are viewing entries you can scroll through them one by one. Getting the entries from the database was easy.

The scrolling turned into hard work especially after deciding that rather than one huge evergrowing list I would like a list showing 10 records that then had page scrolling to show the next 10 etc. This presented problems as initially if you tried to view entry 12 on page 2 you got entry 2 as it was counting from 0 again i had to incorporate an ID into the database and use that instead.

Eventually I also learnt how to pass a sort variable in so that people can resort the lists in date order ascending or descending. This will work on any column in any list.

I wanted thumbnails that you could scroll through. Then when you click each thumbnail it opens a new window with a larger image in it. This was quite easy to produce. What gave me problems here was getting the records into columns as well as rows.

This started as a static list but grew and grew. Eventually I knew that I wanted it to be searchable & allow users to choose how many records to display per page. Once this worked I could plug this feature into any of my list pages. I also ammended the scroll feature on this so that you get page numbers and next & previous I had & still do have problems getting this to work on every page and often end up copying code from somewhere it works and reconstructing the main table around it. I don't have a clue why this happens !!!

This area grew and grew until eventually i needed a way to navigate & display what was in this area easily. I opted for a radio button list which posts to a redirect page passing the value of the button into a go-url variable that basically makes use of response.redirect asp code to find the relevant page and go to it..

An easy one. funky dragons found on a graphics website & maps scanned in then reduced.

At the the start of May 2003 before I left for my travels I decided to extend this area a bit further. I thought it might be fun to have a growing list of places I visited in each country. The dates I visited and a few comments. This was quite easy to do after all the other lists I have worked on. I created some tables for the database that would hold the lists. If there are no records in the table yet then you get a message saying "i havn't been anywhere yet" if there are then a list starts to grow. This was just one of the other features that I thought would keep the site growing while I was away to stop visitors getting bored! Stickiness !!

Another easy one after all the work done so far. It was simplest to do this in the database. No messy script objects etc. A form that adds the message into the database & also sends an email to me telling me I have a message & a thanks email to the person posting the message.

The format of the message board itself is simple & not amazing but hey when i looked at some other message boards & guestbooks it didnt have to be amazing.

The most important thing I wanted to work on here was how to create those simple text formatting sections that some questbooks and forums have on them.

Two problems to deal with.
1) How to pass the simple tags into the text area. Thanks to Shadow Wizard on ASP101.com for his help and it turned out to be really easy.
2) How to change them into real HTML. Eventually thanks to ASPFree Forum and Andrew's response I worked out how to create the code that exchanges the simple tags for correct HTMl tags. Its a simple parsing feature that collects the text from the form and before passing it to the database parses it & switches the simple tags for whatever you tell it to. That makes doing the emoticon images really easy!

The best bit was finding bravenet.com and finding the guestmap. Which i adore because its so dinky & lovely !

The admin section is locked behind a logon screen.

I didn't want just anyone being able to get at my admin area so its password protected. Actually this was great as I had a client who wanted their whole site password protected so I did the code here first.

There are further depths to this section that require even more access but that was easy to work out after login and combines session ID's with cookies.

The admin section also contains an area where I can upload files of any type. So that photos'. graphics for links or attachments for emails can be uploaded without requiring an FTP program. I can also add to my address book online, create journal entries, add to my travel list of places visited etc etc.

I can also bulk mail from this section. Sending either plain txt emails or HTML emails like newsletters to everyone in my maillist.

Another client wanted a system by which people could sign up to be on their mail list. The code was quite complex because I actually wanted it not just to submit email addresses into the database but also check if that address was already there or not and respond accordingly. I also built a delete option in too.

I wanted the home page to change as much as possible. It may look like a page of text in HTML but the entry is actually another database delivered item. This means I can update this anytime I like while I am away. The fact that it has a date on it should indicate to people that it changes & when

You can read the archive of entries here

Click here for a list of common errors & the resolutions I found.