Tech Tips, Tricks & Trivia

Your website log files contain a mine of information about how it is faring, the vistors basic profile and gaps that could exist (404, 500 HTTP errors, SQL injection attempts etc). By analyzing the statistics and making amends when required, the website can be more focussed towards the target audience. These logfiles that contain the IP address of visitors to your site and the time they came in, among other things, are available at %systemroot%\system32\logfiles\w3svcX\ (where X corresponds to the website number of the website you wish to track) WebLog Expert is a powerful log analyzer that gives information about your site's visitors: activity statistics, accessed files, paths through the site, information about referring pages, search engines, browsers, operating systems, and comprehensive reports. WebLog Expert can analyze logs of both Apache and IIS web servers.

Wiki is in the inventor Ward Cunningham's original description: The simplest online database that could possibly work. "A wiki is a computer program that lets people around the world collaborate to create and update Web pages. The resulting collections of pages are also known as wikis. But there's more to it than that. Anyone who reads a wiki -- yes, anyone -- can also easily make changes, corrections and additions, create whole new pages, and even correct the way the wiki is organized." The largest wiki on multiple subjects is the English version of Wikipedia , an online encyclopedia created by volunteers who contribute information based on their expertise or knowledge. Ward Cunningham is now an architect in Microsoft's Prescriptive Architecture Guidance group, which produces patterns and practices for developers using Microsoft's .Net development platform.

"Q. I need to store integers - account numbers and other IDs - that have 20 or more digits. Storage and retrieval of these integers needs to be accurate, with no rounding, so I can't use the float data type. I've seen recommendations to others in this situation to store the integers in a CHAR(20) field. But I don't want to store my number in a character field because I want them to remain numeric values. How can I store integers that have 20 or more digits as numeric values? A. I suggest using the decimal or numeric data type to store the integers. In SQL Server, the numeric and decimal data types are equivalent. Both data types let you store integers that have up to 38 digits. The syntax for defining a decimal data type is: DECIMAL[(p[, s])] The first number after the DECIMAL keyword is the precision setting, which defines the total number of digits the integer can have. The second number is the scale setting, which defines the total number of digits to ...