sending information to other pages.

Well, I'm hosted on brinkster for free and they don't offer cdo to free users so I'm trying to work around it by sending the form contents to a text file.

I can do the sending of the form info to the text file but I need to know when there are new messages so this is what I need to do:

1. on my default homepage which is on my harddrive I plan to have an iFrame which opens up a page on my brinkster site.
2. I need that page to check if there are new messages.

I figured that If on the form page I had a script which changed a variable to say NewMessage = Yes then all I'd have to do is access that variable, but how would I store that variable in a place so that I could access it?

You could have an additional text file that contained a 'YES' or 'NO'


So when you accessed the file via ASP if it contained 'YES' then there are new messages, if 'NO' then there aren't.

why not use an application variable??

Why not check the last modified date of the text file against a cookie on your computer?

http://www.4guysfromrolla.com/webtech/tips/t110699-1.shtml

you could write the messages in an XML file so that it's easier to check for new messages. xml could be something like this:

<?xml version="1.0"?>
<messages>

<message>
<sender>email@domain.com</sender>
<date>08/14/2002</date>
<text>blah blah</text>
<status>Unread</status>
</message>
<message>
...
</message>

</messages>

just check for status and date to check for new messages.
for saving html data to xml, visit http://www.asp101.com/articles/michael/htmlxml/default.asp

i've used XML for my configuration file I used in my site on brinkster. :)