R
Randy Morgan
I am considering changing my web hosting account from a shared Windows
platform to a shared Linux platform. I'm going to give a little
background as to why in the next paragraph, so if you don't care about
the why please just skip it.
My host does not permit access to raw log files, and their included
stats analysis package stinks. I'm using some free services now, but
the amount of data that can is stored is pretty small. I've researched
Awstats, and it looks like an awesome package. There's still the
problem of log files, though, and the trick they suggest to build your
own log files involves a script (pslogger) that is available in perl or
php. My host disables many PHP functions on Windows packages, and some
of those disabled functions show up in the PHP version of the script
that builds log files. I suppose the equivalent Windows technology is
ASP or ASP.NET, which my host would allow, but I can't find where
anybody has ported pslogger to either of them. Doing it myself is
laughably impractical. If move my hosting account to a Linux platform,
those disabled PHP functions become enabled and then everything is duck
soup...well, maybe not duck soup but at least doable.
I can still use FP extensions if I move to a Linux platform, but I lose
support for ASP and ASP.NET. In my site I use databases to hold the
results of a couple forms, and in working through FP to do this it
created some Access databases and had me change the page extension from
..htm to .asp. Since ASP goes away if I change hosting platforms, I'll
have to change the pages. I could change the databases from Access to
MySQL, but FP does not seem to have a robust process for creating or
managing MySQL databases, and they weren't an option I could find when I
was setting up the databases originally.
For those of you who are wondering if there's a questions in here
anywhere, here they are.
1. Am I correct about FP's inability to automatically create and manage
MySQL databases the way it does with Access databases? If true, the
reasons are obvious, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything.
(BTW, a search on "mysql" in FP returns only one item, and that's a link
to the FP MVPs!).
2. Before I started storing form results in a database I put them in
..csv files. This worked fine, but I moved to databases, mainly because
I thought I should because "databases are better". But, the form data
are relatively simple, and I don't expect either database to ever hold
more than about 2000 records of 8 to 10 text fields each. This ain't
the Excel forum, but does anybody have any experience using Excel to
manage files of this size or can comment as to whether they become too
unwieldy to use?
3. I could (I think) avoid all this if there was a version of pslogger
written in ASP or ASP.NET. Anybody seen one?
platform to a shared Linux platform. I'm going to give a little
background as to why in the next paragraph, so if you don't care about
the why please just skip it.
My host does not permit access to raw log files, and their included
stats analysis package stinks. I'm using some free services now, but
the amount of data that can is stored is pretty small. I've researched
Awstats, and it looks like an awesome package. There's still the
problem of log files, though, and the trick they suggest to build your
own log files involves a script (pslogger) that is available in perl or
php. My host disables many PHP functions on Windows packages, and some
of those disabled functions show up in the PHP version of the script
that builds log files. I suppose the equivalent Windows technology is
ASP or ASP.NET, which my host would allow, but I can't find where
anybody has ported pslogger to either of them. Doing it myself is
laughably impractical. If move my hosting account to a Linux platform,
those disabled PHP functions become enabled and then everything is duck
soup...well, maybe not duck soup but at least doable.
I can still use FP extensions if I move to a Linux platform, but I lose
support for ASP and ASP.NET. In my site I use databases to hold the
results of a couple forms, and in working through FP to do this it
created some Access databases and had me change the page extension from
..htm to .asp. Since ASP goes away if I change hosting platforms, I'll
have to change the pages. I could change the databases from Access to
MySQL, but FP does not seem to have a robust process for creating or
managing MySQL databases, and they weren't an option I could find when I
was setting up the databases originally.
For those of you who are wondering if there's a questions in here
anywhere, here they are.
1. Am I correct about FP's inability to automatically create and manage
MySQL databases the way it does with Access databases? If true, the
reasons are obvious, but I want to make sure I'm not missing anything.
(BTW, a search on "mysql" in FP returns only one item, and that's a link
to the FP MVPs!).
2. Before I started storing form results in a database I put them in
..csv files. This worked fine, but I moved to databases, mainly because
I thought I should because "databases are better". But, the form data
are relatively simple, and I don't expect either database to ever hold
more than about 2000 records of 8 to 10 text fields each. This ain't
the Excel forum, but does anybody have any experience using Excel to
manage files of this size or can comment as to whether they become too
unwieldy to use?
3. I could (I think) avoid all this if there was a version of pslogger
written in ASP or ASP.NET. Anybody seen one?
