ASP in a Nutshell, 2nd Edition

Rotator Schedule File

The rotator schedule file is a custom text file that you create. You can call it anything you wish. In it, you specify the details for the advertisements to be displayed on your site. You can specify the sizes of the advertisements, the URLs of images to be used for your ads, and the percentage of time each ad should be selected and displayed when the Ad Rotator object's GetAdvertisement method is called.

There are two sections in the rotator schedule file. The two sections are separated by a single line containing only an asterisk (*). The first section contains the following information that applies to all the advertisements listed in the file:

• The redirection file to use when an ad is clicked. This file's code will be executed before the user's browser is sent to the ad's URL. As described earlier, the redirection file allows for details of the user to be recorded before sending his browser to the ad URL. One good reason to use a redirection file is so that you can include a default URL that will take the user to a default page if no ad URL is included in the rotator schedule file. For example, your site may have a single HTML file that contains a brief description of all its advertisers. You could use the URL of this page as a default URL in the redirection file.

• The size of the border line for each advertisement.

• The width of the advertisement in pixels.

• The height of the advertisement in pixels.

Each of these elements is optional. If you do not have any ...