Gallery

List to starboard

Posted on 22 Sep 2005 at 12:28

Mark Newton blows the dust off his list server and gets into a GoogleFight

This is a neat bit of web programming, based on the AJAX style of coding web applications (talked about here last month), which calls the server for the data but only updates those areas on the page that need updating, so the user doesn't see the page blanking of a traditional website. It's also great fun to try out different combinations of keywords. Several that suggest themselves include Apple vs Intel (Apple wins by the way).

This fun web application is part of the very useful SE-Tools website (www.se-tools.com). We suspect the reason for writing 'googlefight' was probably as a way of promoting SE-Tools by viral marketing, and it seems to work, as it certainly caught our attention. SE-Tools offers a series of free tools that you can use to analyse how well your website is ranked by the various search engines for any particular keyword. Careful use of such tools can help you to refine your site and improve your ranking on the search engines, as a result increasing the number of visitors you get. But just remember, getting visitors is one thing but keeping them is another, and content is all-important for doing that.

ASP.NET File Upload

Most solutions in IT bring with them further problems, a good example being the increase in security apparent on users' workstations, which has brought unexpected problems for Mark's company. The company has developed and runs an online scoring system for sports events, and to obtain the raw data from events simple text-based files need to be uploaded to a central server. How difficult could it be to upload a simple text file? Actually, it seems that the security measures in products such as Norton Internet Security suite can make it very difficult indeed.

Norton isn't the only culprit, but it's the software that comes preinstalled on most machines and, in our experience, the one that the majority of people seem to have the most trouble with. When the scoring system was originally conceived some years ago, it was felt that using FTP via a small program might be the best way to upload these files, as it meant users simply had to click a button. However, it was soon discovered that some of these users were behind their company firewall, which blocked FTP out. This problem became progressively worse as users' machines, quite sensibly, had personal firewall software installed on them, which often not only blocked FTP traffic, but also prevented certain applications from accessing the Internet, so rendering the FTP client that Mark had so lovingly crafted quite useless.

A solution was sought, which was to use email as a way of sending these files as attachments. Then, on the server, a small application looks at the inbox, extracts the attachments and does the necessary with them. This worked fine until some of the email providers started trying to get clever: AOL, for instance, started zipping together multiple attachments, although this very irritating feature has been fixed in the current version. Hotmail is even worse in that it inserts random carriage returns into text files. Quite why Hotmail deems it necessary to alter attachments like this is anyone's guess, but suffice to say it renders the files useless.

Such glitches, coupled with the fact that some emails always get sent with the wrong files attached, meant another solution was urgently needed before our sanity became endangered. It was felt that a web page that allows users to upload a file might be the best solution. This way, the web page can check for the correct file as well, and only allow the correct ones to be uploaded. In previous versions of ASP, this was done using a third-party server component, but ASP.NET has a file upload component already built in, and as our web servers are running this it was the obvious choice.