How to save query from oracle in HTML

Here's some tricks that can help in daily work with oracle. Very often, I need to extract query result from Oracle, or to be more precise ask people to send me query results. It is quite easy to save a file, that's very true but the formatting is excruciatingly unreadable. There's a flurry of tools that can allow you to export your query, but sometimes the only things you have at end because you're connecting to production environment is a good old Sql*Plus.

Here's the trick. Connect to your DB using Sql*Plus and used the following actions:

SET markup HTML on
spool test.html
SELECT * FROM mytable;
spool off
SET markup HTML off

When you type command "SET markup HTML on", your command prompt will look "funky" don't worry it is perfectly normal. After you exit you will find a nice html file. Certainly not the best format, but much more readable than plain 80 column text.

Panda like you've never seen them ...

Whenever someone hear about panda, they usually think about the nice cuddling teddy bear ... Although their are really cute animals they are also an endanger species, and they number are decreasing, and they live in a really restricted zone.

Now if they looked like this, people would certainly think twice before cutting their trees:

(Image created by Pacman23 on DeviantArt)

Technorati Tags: Fun, Panda, Gun

How to get your site/blog referenced by Google (and other search engine)

I've seen a log of people asking themselves, why their blog/site is not yet referenced by a search engine. So here's a little little of the things you can do.

Basically what you need to do is to tell the search engine that you exist, because Internet is HUGE, and there's site popping everywhere every seconds, and they have no way to actually know that you exist (and want to be found).

First if you're using a blog, and specifically your Blogger blog, there's a few settings you need to tweak.

• Go to your Dashboard and then Settings > Basic.
• Make sure your setting look like mine, especially for "Add your blog to our listings?" as well as "Let search engines find your blog?"

Now, the following instruction are true for ANY kind of website, not just a blog.

Getting referenced by Google :

• Go here and fill the form.
• It's done... nothing more to do.

Now that we've done Google, which we can say is probably the most used search engine theses days, it doesn't hurt to get also referenced by other search engine.

Getting referenced by Yahoo

• First thing you can do is check if they already know about your site : Yahoo SiteExplorer
• Go here, and fill the form just like for Google.
• Tada... it's done

Getting Referenced by LiveSearch

• Fill this form

Now with those three, you've got the most commonly used search engine. Well this is partially true. I should say you have covered the most commonly used search engine in the Western world. If you want to toss some more change to have you site visited by Chinese citizen, use the following :

• Baidu site submit
• Zhongsou.

While you're at it you can get your site referenced by Indian search engine :

• Kohj

Now this time I think we are in good shape, and got most of the world covered. That being said, although those search engine are the most used ones, they are still general purpose search engine. If your site/blog is targeting a very specific audience, then you might want to get referenced in specialized search engine.

Also there's something you need to keep in mind, is that there's no better search engine than 'Word to Mouth' ... so try to have people talk/link to your site.

Finally if your site is a commercial one, or you REALLY want to get some traffic, then you might want to invest into Paid search advertising. There's a good article here about it. Most of the search engine above offer such kind of services.

Alex