AUGUST 12th 2004

NEW VERSION OF ASPBANNER IS BEING RELEASED THIS WEEK

ASPBanner Unlimited Version 8.0

It is completely finished.

http://www.aspbanner.com/

This new version has more features and is selling for $99.95

Unlimited Version 7.3 is now named "ASPBanner Standard"

Owner's of Unlimited Version 7.3 can get an upgrade to Unlimited Version 8 for the difference in price (based on current pricing)

It is available now for purchase at the following link .

http://www.aspbanner.com/purchase_unlimited_v8.1_classic_upg rade.asp


The new version can use your existing database so it is a fairly easy upgrade.

If you are not an existing ASPBanner Customer you can use the following link to purchase the application normally.

http://www.aspbanner.com/purchase_unlimited_v8.1_classic.asp


Notes on the new version:

ASPBanner Unlimited Version 8

Improved graphics and some new icons

New reports screen... 4 reports total   3 of which are new

New Iframe Banner Calling method with built in auto refresh feature so banners can rotate at a specified interval on their own

New Zone Order Informaion Page
Visually shows you what the current rotation looks like for a zone

Banners can now be stopped at a certain date and at an impression limit
Whichever is hit 1st.. before it was just one or the other

New "data" folder... this new directory is the only directory that needs permissions
this should make setting up the system and permissions a breeze.. all cjwsoft applications will
eventually use this same folder

New configuration text file... eliminates config table in the database and allows us to easily
add more config options in the future without changing the database.. means easier upgrades down the road
and faster loading of the configuration data

New application data connection wizard
makes setting up the data connection a no brainer

more overall emailing methods supported

CDONTS
CDOSYS
ASPEMAIL
ASPMAIL
ASPSMARTMAIL
DUNDASMAILER
JMAIL
SASMTPMAIL
Bamboo Mail
Simple Mail
ASPQMail
QuickSoft EasyMail Objects
OCXMail

Persists ASPEMail now supports outgoing SMTP authentication.
Simple Mail now supports outgoing SMTP authentication.
It is becoming popular for ISP to use this.

Emailing code now uses functions so we can easily add more email component support down the road

Flash files (.swf) can now be previewed and used in new banner right from the upload page
before this could only be done with image files

Users page now has a notes popup feature
when you hold the mouse over the icon you see all info on a user without needing to edit that user

Edit banner page now shows the color of the banner status in the dropdown menu

New clone banner feature.. allows you to easily create similar banners

Banner application page has been optimized to be even more efficient

Javascript popup calendar date selectors

Ton of misc little things & Improvements...


Some Screenshots

pretty clever...

If anyone is interested in what the Mod function actually does this article explains it nicely. They even use it for the same purpose in the examples.

http://www.asp101.com/articles/steven/mod/default.asp

I do not think it it anything to do with the Application.

You most likely have some sort of ad blocking software that is doing it.

It is seeing the word "banner" or "ad" and blocking the images in your browser.

I doubt it is anything built into xp doing it. XP with SP2 has built in pop-up blockers but no ad blockers like that really. It is norton ad blocker or something of that nature.

Regarding hosting companies..

Now.. obviously if you are hosting on someone elses server you may not be able to set permissions like this.

Ultimately, if you are hosting somewhere and ASP and Database connectivity is part of your hosting plan. It is the hosting company's responsibility to set these permissions for you when asked or to give you a special interface to do so on your own. If they are not helping you do this then maybe it is time to get a hosting company that is serious about your ASP Hosting Needs.

Also... JUST TO BE PERFECTLY CLEAR

The permissions we are talking about cannot be set via FTP or Frontpage access to your web site. They must be set like shown above or via a special interface meant to set the permissions correctly. For all you people out there messing with the permissions you see in FTP and Frontpage.. you are wasting your time and possibly creating problems in your web.

All ASP scripts that communicate with an Access Database, Upload Pictures, Modify Text files.... are going to need these permissions set in some way or another. We have no control over that fact.

I have set up a user to be redirected to a different page when logging in for the first time.

I assumed this function would count the number of times a user has logged in. When the login count was greater than 1, the user would be taken to the default.asp 

This isn't happening. The user is always redirected.  The user login count in the database is now 9.

What am I missing?

Permissions and Folder Locations

By default and to keep things clean we store everything in folder called "data"

That folder then has it in 4 sub folders

database (where the .mdb and temporary .ldb files are handled)
export (where the aspprotect export files are saved)
logfiles (where the aspprotect logfiles are saved)
user_pics (where the user pictures are saved)

Doing it this way makes it very easy for a system administrator to right click on one folder and set permissions for that folder and all of it's child folders.

Now, that being said.. you do not have to use these folders.

For example if you already have a folder in your web with modify permissions for the anonymous webserver account then you can use that one folder to store all of the 4 things above.

You'd simply edit your data connection string to point to that folder and then edit the other paths in the settings area of ASPProtect.

We did it that way so you would have options in case your hosting company was being difficult with your ASP hosting needs.

Your going to have a lot of problems and a lot of the code will have to be re-written.

There are a lot of things in the the code that the MYSQL database system does not support or has issues with . I know because I once made a version of ASPBanner work with MYSQL and it took weeks of work to get it stable.

Null field types can cause problems... but mostly ADO updates which I don't think MYSQL supports at all. All of the ADO stuff would have have to be rewritten.. etc etc

That's probably why you cant get much of the code to write to the database.


Here is a generic example.

An update to an existing record using ADO
http://www.powerasp.com/content/database/ado_update.asp

And update to an existing record using an update query.
http://www.powerasp.com/content/database/using_update.asp

All through the the code the ADO updates would have to converted to update queries which means a lot of work.

I used ADO a lot because I like it and it is little easier to validate data before it is written to the database.

It is also a little easier for customers to understand when they look at the code.

Anyway....

The app just was not designed to work with MYSQL.
It was specifically designed to work with MSSQL and MSACCESS only.

This holds true for all of our applications.

Your running off an IIS 5 Server so I would suggest just using MSACCESS as the database. The Photo Gallery app will run very well using MSACCESS. 

Than you 

I'm happy after changing to XML parser for two of the ads. Later I'll change the other codes to XML, never to use iframe again!

Chris, I'm having problems getting this to work. When I plug in the redirect URL and then try to load the web page, the Flash ad never loads successfully - just its black background in the 468 x 60 space. Here's an example of what I'm seeing:

http://www.innovationtools.com/Articles/ArticleHeadlines.asp

Just keep refreshing the page until the black rectangle appears. And here is the code I've loaded for this flash ad:

<OBJECT classid="clsid:D27CDB6E-AE6D-11cf-96B8-444553540000"
 codebase=" http://active.macromedia.com/flash2/cabs/swflash.cab#version =4,0,0,0" ID=banner WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="60">
 <PARAM NAME=movie VALUE=" http://www.innovationtools.com/aspbanner/aspbanner/banner_re direct.asp?Banner_ID=25">
 <PARAM NAME=quality VALUE=high>
 <PARAM NAME=bgcolor VALUE=#000000>
 <embed src=" http://www.innovationtools.com/aspbanner/aspbanner/images/ba nners/mindmatters_innovation3.swf "
quality="high" bgcolor="#3CBDCD" WIDTH="468" HEIGHT="60" TYPE="application/x-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE=" http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Pr od_Version=ShockwaveFlash">
</OBJECT>

What am I doing wrong? By the way, I'm using the standard version of ASPBanner. Not sure of the version, but it dates from about 2002.

I purchased 6.0 in Feb 05.  Is there an upgrade price to 7.0

I spent considerable time setting up 6.0 to work with my web site. From what I read in the forum, it sounds like I have to start over again to integrate the new version into our web site. I do not relish the thought of that, but I have to move to an email system with a valid MX record.

Will I be starting over from scratch with this upgrade?

Kurt,

There really is no default width in general.

The thing to remember is that the default.asp page includes a lot of different pages.. and some of those pages also include pages.

Now all of this gets wrapped by the header and footer include files so in a sense what you do there can effect everything inside to a certain degree.

Now there are some widths set here and there for different tables and what not on certain pages, but its really the kind of situation where you just have to dig around in the code and experiment until you eventualy find what you are looking for and get the desired result.

I'd love to tell you there is easy way to just set a width, but it is not that simple.

Maybe someday it will be. Just not in the current version.

CJW

in Control_pic.asp is there way to wrap the description field so that it doesn't go outside the table.

Thanks

This is great documentaion for windows script 5.6
in windows chm file format for jscript and vbscript.

We use server side vbscript in all our our ASP 3.0 applications so this info can be a lot of help.

2005-02-18_150921_vbscript_docs.zip

this could go on forever...

if you want PM "private message" me info to log into your site.. show me the pages we are dealing with...

and I will take a look at it all...

CJW

Hello,

Thank you for the feedback.

I would like to point out the requirements of the application however as this is something I am aware of and do address.

http://support.cjwsoft.com/code/moreinfo165-1.htm

These requirments are directly linked to from the ASPProtect v7 web page, so its not like I dont try to tell people the deal regarding SQL server.

Basically I only have the resources to provide scipts and instructions for using SQL Enterprise Manager and that is all I officially support. I also personally think anyone using a SQL Server should be using SQL Enterprise Manager because later on down the road there are things you may want to do such as backups/etc etc

Take Care,

Chris Williams
www.CJWSoft.com

Hi,

No, only ".asp" files can be protected.  It is the nature of Forms Based Authentication when using web based scripting technologies whether those scripts be ".cgi", ".asp", ".php", or whatever.

To protect entire direcotries at once you really need to run your own webserver and use NTFS permissions and user accounts..... or if something special is installed on the server there may be ways to do it as well. That usually isn't going to happen under a shared hosting account but there are special authentication products for such a thing that some hosting companies do purchase and allow their hosting customers to use.

Using aspprotect we do give working examples of ways to stream and partially protect images and downloads while a user is logged in to an ".asp" page.

Also, any ".htm" pages can simply be renamed to ".asp" if you need to protect them. Links to each other need to be updated of course because of the extension change.

In my opinion the truth of the matter is most high end sites use Forms Based Authentication with scripts. Not directory protection as it is fairly primitive/old school as well as sometimes being confusing for the users of the site because of how the login window from the server often gets stuck behind the browser.. etc etc

If you have a lot of pages in a site that you need to add protection code to then if can often be helpful to use a good Multiple file search and replace program to carefully add the protection code to the top of the source code of the pages. There are even multiple file search and replace programs that can rename extensions which can be helpful for large sites.

For images and graphics you want protect you have to do some work and set up and intelligent system for yourself.

Lastly whether you use https:// or not is no concern to ASPProtect as it works the same under https:// as it does under http://

I just added this line to the paypal1.asp page

<input type="hidden" name="currency_code" value="CAD">

and it worked.  Clearly other values can be entered for other currencies.  Everything was listed in this manual https://www.paypal.com/en_US/pdf/subscriptions.pdf.

Cheers
Roy

Glad it is working.. for anyone reading this the customer bascially did this
http://support.cjwsoft.com/forum/forum_posts.asp?TID=36& PN=1

That being said asp photo gallery actually has a few more places that send email that you going to need to modify as well. Off hand the reply to album, admin massemail, admin send email,and postcard features come to mind possibly as 3 of them.

using a multiple file search and replace utility like ReplaceEm would be the easy way to do all of this in one step and find all the instances

http://www.orbit.org/replace/

thats because you can not have exchange server running at the same time as the windows IIS virtual smtp server..

they clash with one another... and thats why the emails never get picked up by the iis stmp server

you have to send the emails another way like using a true remote mail server..  I am not sure but if your exchange server can do pop 3 you can probably use that that way

you may be able to change the pickup directory that cdosys uses under the virtual SMTP scenario, but I am not sure if that will work with exchange picking it up, but maybe it will work ok because you said it does when you paste them in there manually.. I do not really know.. you'd have to try it and edit the email sub routine to use that pickup path

"scripts/emailing_subs_inc.asp" is where you could try editing that path

Hi,

I only just purchased the product and I would be very keen to

a) is the upgrade available very soon as I don't want to spend the time developing one and than find the other released shortly & 

b) would I only need to pay the difference for the upgrade or have I already downloaded the upgrade already.

I cant see what version I current have.

I look forward to your response.

Alternate Method to call banners from non ".asp" pages.

<iframe src ="http://localhost/aspbanner/aspbanner/aspbanner_inc.asp?Ban nerZone=4" width="468" height="60" frameborder="0" marginwidth="0" marginheight="0" scrolling="no"></iframe>

Be sure to delete the space in the BannerZone variable above. I am not sure why it is doing that in this post.

You can try calling the banners in an simple iframe like so.
This method should work much better than the javascript method because users with javascript turned off will still see the banners. You also will not have any of the limitations the javascript method has. Iframe is now supported by most recent browsers so it is now a good solution. Here is a chart that shows which browser versions support iframe.

Be sure however to edit the height and width values accordingly as that is very important.

Anyone have any experience configuring PhotoGallery to use a backend mySQL database?

The application connects successfully for Read operations, but no amount of troubleshooting can get it to Write records to the tables.

http://www.marc-lisa.com/photos/default.asp

Excellent

I'm all set - after thinking about your replies - i checked a bit more and changed the email component type -- thanks again for all your help.

ASPProtect v7 comes with working example code of protecting an image from being downloaded and also protects the true file location of the image on your server..

This comes with the system as an example folder with some files in it.

Basically we protect the image in 2 ways.

All in all this is should be very effective protection. Yes, there are still ways to get the images like doing screen captures, but this will ensure that people viewing images are logged in to your site. This will in most cases keep them from right clicking and saving the images. This will ensure that people can not tell other people the image's url location and it will ensure other sites can not leach your images and bandwidth.

For the image protection examples to work you may need to edit some values
in the stream_pic.asp file that are valid for your setup.

Look at the source. The values you can edit are commented.

Now, you also need to call a valid "image file name" from the call_pic.asp file which is an example of how you protect a page with javascript and call a streamed image using an image tag.

Lasty, here is a great article I found on image protection and some of the things you can do about it and some of things you cannot.

http://pubs.logicalexpressions.com/Pub0009/LPMArticle.asp?ID =41