The Misadventures of Dan
Peer into the mind of Dan as he tries to build an MP3 Player for his PDA and searches for the next thing in his life be it an electrical engineering job or graduate school.
Wednesday, October 15, 2003
.:1:13:53 AM:.
Creating Directories using ASP
This looks like its done using VBscript...
Sub CreateFolder(strFolderPath)
Dim objFSO
'create an FSO
Set objFSO = Server.CreateObject("Scripting.FileSystemObject")
'make sure folder doesn't already exist
if NOT objFSO.FolderExists(strFolderPath) then
objFSO.CreateFolder(strFolderPath)
end if
Set objFSO = Nothing
End Sub
Tuesday, October 14, 2003
.:8:31:04 PM:.
Two-column CSS headaches
In trying to build a two column website for eMi Canada I set out certain criteria. Since I didn't know who would be editing and how, I wanted to make the code as simplistic as possible. To me, this meant not using tables for the layout-this is yet another reason to use CSS. With CSS you can clearly define the sections like "menu" or "content". All the person edits and sees are the paragraphs in fact you _almost_ don't have to worry about the HTML code.
For the website, I wanted to have a menu at the top (still haven't decided if I'm going to use CSS-Image replacement for the links) and then two sections, one for the main content, and then a side column for blurbs. The problem was initially I couldn't get the whole thing to stretch. It would either size itself to one column or the other and then when the other ran longer it would simply overwrite-no good!! The trick was to add an extra div at the end after the divs of the two columns but before you close the encompassing/overall one.
<div id="the_big_kahuna">
<div id="column1"></div>
<div id="column2"></div>
<div style="clear:both;"></div> <!-- Make sure you add THIS tag, otherwise the page gets lopsided -->
</div> <!-- End of "the_big_kahuna" -->
Wow, third post in a row....
.:8:23:12 PM:.
Its been a while...
Since my last official post, I've completed running a half-marathon (woohoo!) with an awesome time of 1 hour and 37 minutes I can't really complain :) Now, onto the real deal!
In case you didn't notice the music tracker project is well underway. A lot of people seemed interested in it so who knows. The main problem I'm encountering is how to enter a massive number of tracks/songs. I'm not sure if ASP can parse through excel files, but then how would you export them to an excel file? For that matter how can you enter in new artists? The database balloons really quickly and I can only start to imagine how hard it would be to enter. I'll worry about that later. For now I'm working on implementing a login/user ASP thing-using session variables so that no one can see the vitals.
I've also been asked to build a website for eMi Canada. Having photos to play around with definitely makes the design process go easier. Fireworks and Dreamweaver together are an awesome and nearly seamless combo!
Netaid is great, a while ago I volunteered to go help out with Teachers Without Borders and now it looks like I'll be helping them out again.
.:8:10:52 PM:.
YES!!! A Solution
Finally!!! I've been trying to work on the Book/Music chooser because it seems to come up more and more. Anyways I was trying to figure out an SQL statement that would join a table to another table twice. After a few days of googling I finally came upon the solution.
I took out all the non-essential details and left the fields of interest
Table 1
| BookID | IsLikeID |
Table 2
| BookID | Title |
The problem was how do you get "Table 1" to display the titles of the books in both columns and not their IDs? Apparently you have to alias-Of course!! BUT when you do this:
SELECT b1.Title, b2.Title FROM (T1 INNER JOIN T2 AS b1 ON T1.BookID = b1.BookID) INNER JOIN T2 AS b2 ON T1.IsLikeID = b2.BookID;
Apparently, it was all about the brackets. Who knew? Not me.
