Newman Zone - Weblog

Thursday, January 30, 2003

Slammer Attack 12:13 AM
In case you didn't notice, my hosting provider got slammed by the Slammer worm last Friday. As a result, they were forced to shut down SQL Server for all their customers - literally thousands of web sites - until they applied service pack 3.

Fortunately, my own computer wasn't infected, but that's little consolation: Newman Zone was effectively out of commission until Monday. I don't know what big e-commerce sites did (besides switch to Unix), but it sure doesn't give me much faith in Microsoft. Of course, I shouldn't be surprised, after shelling out $10 plus tax for Windows XP Service Pack 1 on CD-ROM. That's like Firestone recalling a tire and making you pay for it. No, it's worse than that - it's like Firestone recalling a tire, making you pay for it, and insisting that you install all the new tires yourself. What did surprise me, but probably shouldn't have, is that my hosting provider doesn't apply all of Microsoft's patches as a matter of routine.

In any case, the problem seems to be over...for now. I hope most of you were spared the worst of it.

Friday, January 24, 2003

ActivEdit WYSIWYG HTML Editor Extension 1:17 PM
Remember PD Online HTML Editor? If you read my book, you know that it takes a bit of effort to make it compatible with Dreamweaver MX. That's why I hounded CFDev.com to allow me to create a Dreamweaver MX extension for ActivEdit. Well, they finally caved...

This week, three new extensions were added to Newman Zone: ActivEdit ASP, ActivEdit CF, and ActivEdit JSP. These extensions greatly simplify the task of inserting CFDev's ActivEdit into pages generated by Dreamweaver MX. They are also compatible with Dreamweaver's standard server behaviors, which means you can use ActivEdit to insert and update database records.

For those of you unfamiliar with ActivEdit, it's a browser-based HTML editor that's great for content management. Version 3.0 now includes a Java applet that supports Netscape 6+ and Mozilla, in addition to Internet Explorer 4+. The ActivEdit extensions are bundled with a free developer edition of ActivEdit, so you can start using it right away.

If you want to know more about ActivEdit, here are some places to start:

*ActivEdit ASP/CF/JSP
*ActivEdit demo
*ActivEdit tutorial
*ActivEdit screenshots
*ActivEdit requirements

This extension took months to develop and includes many advanced features. If you need to edit database content or text files online, it's worth checking out.

Wednesday, January 01, 2003

Tomcat Tutorial 7:04 PM
Happy New Year, everyone!

I found an extremely useful tutorial on Installing Apache Tomcat by Chris Williams. The tutorial focusses on what you need to set up a JSP environment for Dreamweaver MX.

Follow this tutorial, and complete the Getting Started lessons in Using Dreamweaver MX, and you'll be on your way to building JSP sites in Dreamweaver.

For those of you who haven't meddled with JSP, Apache Tomcat is a servlet container and stand-alone web server. The latest version is jakarta-tomcat-4.1.18 (8.3 MB). You'll also need a copy of the Java 2 SDK (37.7 MB). Both Tomcat and the Java SDK are free downloads.