[thelist] Determining if an ASP is really an ASP file

Chris Marsh chrism at puffofsmoke.net
Mon May 27 12:29:01 CDT 2002


> All of the sites I build use the ASP extension.

[..]

> This allows me to
> maintain a consistent navigation on each page, and if

As a side comment (and please forgive me my pedantry) you don't need to
have the .asp file extension for simple html includes. The default file
extensions in IIS for static pages to be parsed for pre-processing
directives IIRC are .stm and .shtml. If you have a static site with
SSIs, it will improve performance slightly to name the files .stm/.shtml
instead of .asp.

> anything changes, i.e. a new section is added, I only have to
> update the one include file .. instead of having to edit each
> of the HTML files.
>
> I don't know how i survived before I discovered include files.  :)

I'm with you there :)

> Now, to answer your specific question .. I don't know of any
> way to know if content is dynamically being generated, i.e.
> coming from a DB or not. Perhaps reading the source file for
>  comments might be helpful.  Personally, I write my comments
>  within <% asp %> tags most of the time .. so, even my own
> sites won't tell ya one way or another if they are db driven.

Your best bet is looking for large amounts of links with
non-human-friendly querystring identifiers; the kind of thing that looks
as if it's been generated automatically. Look at the depth of the
structured content. After a certain amount of content/listings, it's
simply not feasible to use static pages. Template pages with different
copy can also give you a clue perhaps.

Regards

Chris Marsh




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