Get Toasted

If you've been a visitor here in the past, you'll notice something new over on the left navigation bar. We've added a forum section so that you can post questions and comments about various web-related topics.

So, let's talk about adding a forum to your web site. The package we installed is Toast 1.5, a free ASP based message board: www.toastforums.com. To run this software, you'll need a Windows IIS capable of serving up Active Server Pages (.asp), support for Access 97/2000 databases and SMTP installed to send e-mail via CDONTS or other mail object. The "readme.txt" states that you can install Toast in three easy steps and there isn't a step three. Well...in reality it took more than three steps, but I got it going eventually.

The biggest snag that I encountered was that my WinNT 4.0 box didn't have the most recent version of VBscript installed. This resulted in a "Unknown scripting language" error.

Since the documentation was pretty skimpy (a FAQ stating some specifics would have been nice), I had to poke around Toast's own forum to find a clue. Now, maybe it's just me, but I usually don't appreciate having to read through a few dozen posts trying to find what I need. If you need Windows Script ver. 5.5 then just say so. Ok, end of complaint.

So, once I got past that hurdle, the rest of the setup was fairly straight forward. I was surprised to find that the product supported several mailing objects and fortunately one that I had already installed on the server. The rest is history.

So, click on the forums link and post a note while you're here.