There are three parts to consider when using the Ad Rotator component.
The Rotator Schedule File
The instantiation of the AdRotator object itself within the web page where you want your banners rotated
The Redirection File
First - The Rotator Schedule File
This is the meat of the different banners and where they are sent when the graphic files are clicked.
There are two sections -
The first section lists the parameters that apply to all advertisement images in the rotation schedule,
line by line.
The first line is the name of the Redirection File.
The second line is the width of the graphic
The third line is the height of the graphics
The fourth Line is the border around the graphics - for a one pixel border, you would put 1, for no
border, put in 0
Example:
redirect Redirect.asp
Width 468
Height 60
Border 0
The second section must be separated from the first section, on a separate line, by an asterisk (*). This
section contains all the data for each of the graphics. For each banner/ad graphics, there are four lines.
First Line - the url of the graphic itself (http://www.whatever.com/grphics/MyFirstBanner.gif)
Second Line - the URL to where the viewer is redirected when he/she clicks on the banner. This can be a
dash (-) if there is no page to go to (though I couldn't wonder why you'd do this, IMHO)
Third line - the mouseover text that will appear
Fourth line - the weight of the graphic banner in respect to the others. According to Microsoft -
"For example, if a Rotator Schedule file contains three ads with impressions set to 2, 3, and 5, the first
advertisement is displayed 20 percent of the time, the second 30 percent of the time, and the third 50
percent of the time."
Once this page is finished, you must save it and name it. For this example, I have named mine 'adrot.txt'.
It doesn't have to be an ASP or HTML file....no headers are involved, just the plain text.
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Second - Instantiate the object in the ASP page:
<% Dim MyAd
Set MyAd = Server.CreateObject("MSWC.AdRotator")%>
<% =MyAd.GetAdvertisement("/adrot.txt") %>
You can put HTML Centers around this section of code to center it on the page.
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Now, there's one last part - the Redirection file. Above, you will notice that, in this example, I called
it Redirect.asp. You can call it anything you want - it doesn't matter what it's called.
On that page all you need is the following code:
<% Response.Redirect(Request.QueryString("url")) %>
Just remember, if you have created a new page with a program that includes all the HTML basic markup and
you put this line in the file, you must put the following line as the first line of the file so it will
work:
<% Response.Buffer= true%>
And that's it - that's all it takes to get the Ad Rotator Component working.