Geek Fun
This page describes some of the technical details behind SurfScranton. We hope fellow geeks find this interesting.
Hosting
SurfScranton is hosted by Burlee. Burlee provides lots of great Windows NT features at very competitive prices. We first appeared on Burlee on 1-9-2000 after our old hosting provider vanished from the planet.
SurfScranton Construction
How do we keep all those links and categories, table of contents and alpha pages straight? Our provider supports dynamic content through ASP, but we took a different route.
We keep the master list of links in an Excel spreadsheet that allows up to three categories per site. We do all site maintenance (adding, removing, changing links) in the spreadsheet.
We create page skeletons in Front Page, and run a series of Rexx programs to generate all the links. The first uses Rexx/SQL and ODBC to read the spreadsheet and write one list of sites sorted by category and another list sorted by name.
The second reads these and generates the table portions of the HTML pages. The third reads the HTML page skeletons and interprets Rexx language scripts that are embedded in the HTML. The scripts generate the navigation bars, merge in the prepared HTML tables and the number of sites. All this is done on a local PC, so the server sees it all as static content for fast loading.
This process lets us keep the links in a useful format and generate all the HTML from the spreadsheet, ready to publish, in under 30 seconds. Honest! Good clean geek fun.
Click Here for the generic REXX macro processing part of the job. Get in touch if you are interested in the database bits. Click the graphic below to visit Mark Hessling's home page for support for the free Regina Rexx interpreter, Rexx/SQL and more.
Ad Rotator
The ad rotator is a very simple JavaScript ASP program. It does not use the Microsoft ad rotator component. It is very similar in concept, but does not have the added features of counting impressions or clicksY Drop us a note if you are interested in the code.