Hosting Service Review: Readyhosting.com [Back to Top]

Unofficial Help Site for Readyhosting.com: http://www.readyhelp.net (A very informative site -- Thanks, Sam S.!)

Until late June 2002, this site was a subweb of www.specright.com, owned by SpecRight, Inc. -- thanks for the space!  Then, I decided to purchase my own domain, www.craigwhite.net.  I was already extremely pleased with their service at my business site, so I naturally went with them for my new domain.  Since I already paid the full $99 a year for my business account, I got craigwhite.net for half price ($50 per year).  Also, Readyhosting.com pays my registration fee for my new domain (as they do my business account).  They have some kind of agreement with Network Solutions or something (I guess).  But you heard right, I'll never have to pay an annual fee for my domains!

Readyhosting.com offers MS-Win2K hosting which allows me full use of my .asp expertise.  The package comes with 500MB of disk space (unmetered traffic), unlimited email aliases, and several other kudos.  Their servers already have several .asp components installed and ready for use including ASPEmail, ASPUpload, and others.  The servers are "development ready" for FrontPage, Cold Fusion, Real Audio/Video, and more.  Their service costs $99 for one year ($8.33 per month).  To view my log on their service performance clicke here.

Before going with Readyhosting.com, I was a very unsatisfied customer of Webhosting.com.  Not only was my site inaccessible at any given time, but they even lost my content once during a "server upgrade" of some sort (some upgrade!).  Twice my password changed without notice.  Also, their service desk was never (not an exaggeration) able to help me immediately.  They acted as an answering service by relaying my every request to another party.  Furthermore, each and every request had to be "escalated" before it was serviced.  This meant me, not their answering service, revisiting the support site and manually requesting so.  Guess some people still operate under the "squeaky wheel" philosophy.  My guess is they'll be out of business soon, or hopefully (for them) bought out by somebody who knows what they're doing ... like Readyhosting.com.

Separating Content with Lines [Back to Top]

This trick is accomplished simply by using plain HTML and a 1x1 (pixel) transparent .gif image (not really a trick at all).

Illustration #1:
Content for Cell 1 Content for Cell 2 Content for Cell 3		Notice that the lines are touching (there are no gaps).  This is accomplished by setting the cellpadding, cellspacing, and border elements of the <table> tag to 0.  Also note that anywhere a line is visible, it's actually a cell (<td>...</td> pair) that contains the transparent .gif image (dot.gif) and whose <bgcolor> has been set to the desired line color.  Play around with (copy & paste) the following code and see what happens when you change the <table> element values from 0 to something else.  To change the line color all you have to do is change the bgcolor value of the two <td> elements.  And to change the line thickness, change the width or height elements of the <img> tag. <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0>   <tr>     <td>       Content for Cell 1     </td>     <td bgcolor=darkslateblue>       <img src=images/dot.gif>     </td>     <td>       Content for Cell 2     </td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td colspan=3 bgcolor=darkslateblue>       <img src=images/dot.gif>     </td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td colspan=3 align=center>       Content for Cell 3     </td>   </tr> </table>
Illustration #2:
Content for Cell 1 Content for Cell 2 Content for Cell 3		Notice now that the lines are still touching but the content is no longer uncomfortably close to the lines.  This is done by simply placing the content inside of its own table and setting its cellspacing element to 5 (or whatever you want your margin to be).  Examine the HTML below: <table cellpadding=0 cellspacing=0 border=0>   <tr>     <td>       <table cellspacing=5>         <tr>           <td>             Content for Cell 1           </td>         </tr>       </table>     </td>     <td bgcolor=darkslateblue>       <img src=images/dot.gif>     </td>     <td>       <table cellspacing=5>         <tr>           <td>             Content for Cell 2           </td>         </tr>       </table>     </td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td colspan=3 bgcolor=darkslateblue>       <img src=images/dot.gif>     </td>   </tr>   <tr>     <td colspan=3 align=center>       <table cellspacing=5>         <tr>           <td>             Content for Cell 3           </td>         </tr>       </table>     </td>   </tr> </table>

Web Scraping Tutorial [Back to Top]

Here is a mini-tutorial showcasing a few useful .asp functions I wrote that "scrape" and manipulate content from other web sites.  For those who want to skip the tutorial and just download the source code, click here.

I also have an Online Web Scraper that lets you do your own scraping right from your browser (you specify the page to scrape and the text you want to pull in).

A Basic Example: "Current Conditions" Weather Image

I thought it would be nice to display a "current conditions" weather icon on my site.  I looked up the weather for my zip code at http://www.weather.com.  The following page came up after I put in my zip code: http://www.weather.com/weather/local/37312?lswe=37312&lwsa=WeatherLocalUndeclared.  It had a nice graphic (color 52x52 .gif image) just like I wanted.  Then I viewed the source for the page and found that the image itself was being displayed with:

<IMG SRC="http://image.weather.com/web/common/wxicons/52/28.gif" width="52" height="52" BORDER="0" ALT="Mostly Cloudy">

I assumed that the <IMG SRC="http://image.weather.com/web/common/wxicons/52/ portion of the tag would stay the same and only the remaining 28.gif" width="52" height="52" BORDER="0" ALT="Mostly Cloudy"> would change depending on the weather (some guesswork is required in this type of exercise).

Next, I searched the source to make sure <IMG SRC="http://image.weather.com/web/common/wxicons/52/ was only found once in the page or that the first occurrence of the tag that I wanted.  Lucky for me, it was the only one on the page.  So now, I knew I needed to do the following:

1. Scrape (download) the page into a string variable (using my getHTML() function).
2. Isolate the image tag (using my scrapetext() function):

1. Excluding everything before <IMG SRC="http://image.weather.com/web/common/wxicons/52/
2. Excluding everything after the > character that ended the image tag

Here's the code to do this:

<!--#include file="include/scraper.inc"-->

<%
' first step: get the page ...
thepage    = "http://www.weather.com/weather/local/37312?lswe=37312&lwsa=WeatherLocalUndeclared"
thepage    = getHTML(thepage)

' second step: isolate the image tag ...
look4      = "<IMG SRC=""http://image.weather.com/web/common/wxicons/52/"
goback2    = "<IMG"
goforward2 = ">"
theimage   = scrapetext(thepage, look4, goback2, goforward2, true)

' now, show the output (the actual image) ...
response.write theimage
%>

View/Download (use your browser's "save link as" feature to download)

• scraper.zip
  Contains the following functions:
  
  • getHTML()
  • scrapetext()
  • striptext()
  • swaptext()
  • inserttext()
• proxy.zip
  You may also want to try these functions if you have to go through a proxy server:
  
  • getHTMLViaProxy()
  • getImageViaProxy()

Time-Based Dynamic Content (Content Capturing) [Back to Top]

Content capturing is the process of scraping HTML content from other web sites and then saving that content to files on your own web server.  See the section above on Web Scraping for a detailed explanation of the first step to content capturing.

For it to be "time-based" content, obviously there has to be a way to determine how much time has elapsed since the content was last "captured".  This is accomplished using an .asp application variable whose value is a date & time stamp.  .asp application variables are similar to session variables except that application variables stay alive and are visible across all sessions.  This means that no matter how many active browsers are at your site, they all will see application("date") as the same value.  In fact, until their values are manually reassigned or "blanked out", an application variable will maintain its value until the web server is restarted.

At this site each time a page with time-based content is visited, the following takes place to determine whether its content should be updated (re-scraped).

1. If application("date") is blank, then its value is set to yesterday's date.  This means that the content will probably be updated since the longest time I allow between updates is 12 hours.
2. Evaluate how much time has elapsed between the current time and application("date").  If more than the desired time has elapsed, then the content is updated.
3. If the content was updated, then the application("date") variable is reset to the current time.

<%
if application("date") = "" then application("date") = date() - 1

' Refresh if it's been 12 hours or more ...
if datediff("h", cdate(application("date")), now()) >= 12 then

   ' Step 1: Get & Manipulate HTML ...
   votd  = getHTML("http://www.verseoftheday.com/verse.js")
   if votd = "" then
      votd = "<i>Unavailable</i>"
   else
      look4 = "document.write("""
      back2 = "document.write("""
      back2 = "/<a href=http://www.verseoftheday.com/copyright.html"
      verse = scrapetext(votd, look4, back2, up2, false)
      verse = replace(verse, "<DIV ALIGN=right><font size=1>", "")
      verse = replace(verse, "\", "")
      votd  = replace(verse, "<br>", "  -- <i>") & "</i>"
   end if

   ' Step 2: Save the content locally ...
   call text2file(votd, server.mappath(".") & "\" & "votd.inc")

   application("date") = now()  ' reset the app var

end if
%>