More than one way to skin a cat...

A tutorial about loading data using a variety of techniques - Part One

It struck me earlier, how as a web-geek, with so many tools and techniques available today, it's hard to know where to start sometimes. So, as a fun little exercise, I'm going to write my first proper tutorial, and not only that, I'm going to use a variety of technologies to illustrate my point.

I've no doubt many of you will have seen one of the "Web 2.0 Domain Name" generators out there, such as the Web 2.0 Domain Name Generator, or the more interesting Suggest.Name.

Back in 2000 I was one of the team involved in the now sadly defunct Music.gb.com, and I wrote a "Band Name Generator" using plain HTML and ASP. After looking about at some of the current generators out there, I thought I'd write an article showing a few different techniques to produce the same final result, using a combination of HTML, CSS, XML, Flash, ActionScript2, Actionscript3, JavaScript and jQuery.

Still reading? Cool. Let's get started. For the purposes of this tutorial we're going to use a very simple Access database (you could be a lot cleverer with this if you like), with a table that contains the words we will use as the starting point for our generated words. The table only needs 2 columns (ID and word). Once you have created your table and entered a few words that appeal to your sensibilities (or lack thereof), you should have something like this...

As you may have read in my previous posts, I'm not a "proper programmer", so to make life easy, I'm going to use Dreamweaver to get the data to the browser. Don't worry, you can download the source files to accompany this article here. If you want to just copy and paste, you will find the data output ASP source code which you can adapt to your requirements here.

You should now have a working page which will give you a plain ASP document which outputs your generated word. Click here to see it. That should keep you amused until I publish part 2!

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