ServersAlive ASP Template Setup
New users often have a hard time understanding where the templates and the ASP files go.
The first part is the “BEFORE” file, called the template, that ServersAlive uses to generate a web page. You can store this anywhere as long as ServersAlive knows where it is, and the file extension can be anything - ASP, HTM, TXT, you name it. This is the one you edit.
The second part is the “AFTER” file, called the page, that ServersAlive generated from the template. You have to store this one in your web server’s home directory, or a subdirectory underneath it. This file has to end with an “.asp” file extension so that the web server knows to process it. With ordinary html templates, the file extension can be anything (html, htm, asp, php, whatever) but the “.asp” extension tells IIS that this file has some business logic in it.
This screen shot shows a basic configuration of a template. The configuration screen shows the page name (the “AFTER” file) first, and the template file (the “BEFORE” file) second. Note that the template file ends in htm, and the page name ends in ASP.
The first time you set up a template, when you hit the “…” button to browse to the page name, the page will not be there. Browse to the c:\inetpub\wwwroot directory, hit Open, and then type the file name into this box manually. After ServersAlive generates the page (check in Explorer to see if the file has been created), then you’ll be able to go to http://YourMachineName/ASPbars.asp and see the page.
If c:\inetpub\wwwroot Isn’t There
If that directory doesn’t exist yet, then Windows hasn’t installed a web server. Go into the Control Panel and click Add/Remove Programs to add Internet Information Server. It’s a free web server included with Windows.
You can’t use these templates on Linux or any other operating system, only with Windows Personal Web Server or IIS. You may hear people saying that you can indeed run ASP pages on Linux, and that’s true, but only when they’re written in a Linux-friendly programming language. My ServersAlive templates are written in VBscript, which gets called a lot of things, and “Linux-friendly” is never one of them.
