Howto Create a Hit Counter Using the Global.asa File

Published 20 years ago

If you have a live Web site on the World Wide Web, you may be interested in how many people are visiting your site. You can of course analyze the log files of your Web server but that information is usually difficult to read. The log files contain information for each and every request a visitor has made to your site, including resources like images, Flash movies and so on. This makes it near impossible to extract information about individual users. It would be a lot easier if you could count the number of individual users that have visited you since you started your site. It would also be useful if you could see the number of users that are currently browsing your site.

This article will show you how to accomplish these two tasks by storing the hit counters in Application variables using code in the global.asa file. The disadvantage of this method is that this information is lost when you restart the Web server. Two subsequent articles will demonstrate how to store this information in a text file and in a database, so the value for the counter will be preserved when you restart your Web server.

There is also an ASP.NET version of this article available.

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Howto Style the Button of a input type="file" Control

Published 20 years ago

Update!! 12-20-2003
There seems to be a problem with the code presented in this article. When you click the new and styled Browse button, the Browse for File dialog is opened, and when you select a file, both text boxes (the hidden and the fake field) are displayed with the file's full path and filename. However, when you click the submit button, the real (and hidden) file box gets cleared and the form will not submit. When you click the submit button again, the form will eventually submit, but because the file box is empty, your file will not be uploaded to the server. This problem has been discussed extensively on various forums on the web, including the one run by Wrox.

So far, I haven't been able to isolate the problem or come up with a solution. It looks like this problem is caused by some security mechanism in Internet Explorer. I haven't tested various versions of IE yet, but I am sure it doesn't run on IE 6, SP1 (well, it doesn't run on *my* IE 6, SP1 ;-) )

If you do find a browser that runs this code fine, please let me know.

When you are using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS) in your Web pages, it is likely that you want to change the appearance of your HTML buttons as well. After all, the dull looking gray buttons give your site a bit of an old fashioned look. Usually, changing the style is as easy as setting a style or a class attribute, like <input type="button" value="Send Form" style="background-color: red";> to give the button a red color. However, this won't work with the Browse button that is attached to an input box that allows a user to upload a file. This article will demonstrate a solution to that problem.

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Howto Create a Microsoft Access Database from ASP Code

Published 20 years ago

Although you should try to make most of your database design decisions at design-time, it can sometimes be really handy to create a database from your ASP code. This article explains how to create a Microsoft Access database using ASP.

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