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The Diamond Mine: Part II
The Diamond Mine Telnet BBS Listing gets more ASP!
For the next two years, Dave and I had sporatic contact. Our mutual hosting company, Alentus,
made some OS changes which required minor code updates but the site remained basically unchanged until 2004.
In the early spring of 2004, I noticed that Alentus had installed a server side component by
MITData which would allow me to create zip files through an ASP script. Thinking
immediately of Dave's offline zip file, I contacted him and once again offered my services. Dave told me he had been considering
some alterations for the site and had been thinking of calling me to help him implement them.
The Zip File
Already having the code for the offline zip files in the database, I set to the task of converting it from VBA (Visual
Basic for Applications) to VBS (Visual Basic Script, the language behind the ASP pages). The resulting script reads the database,
creates five text file listings of the BBS systems, sorted by type (telnet and dial-up), writes them to the server disk and archives
them along with their companion files in a zip archive. It then redirects the user to the newly created zip file's URL.
The entire process appears to be nothing more than a standard HTML file download to the end user. The result is an continuously
up to date file with no manual interaction from the site operator! For an example,
Click Here.
Next chapter, the listing get an overhaul.....
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