It’s Just Poison…

If you’re a web guy for a site that has dynamic content (ie. something.asp?ID=1&name=sup), you may be aware that search engines only index each page once. So, like my site, I have about 40,000 mods, but they’re all shown by the same mod.asp page. Google therefore will only recognize 1 page. It ignores the querystring. For all the nix guys out there, they can just use the mod_rewrite function, but IIS doesn’t have that. So, I found this little tool a couple years ago, and have been using it since. It’s called LinkFreeze. It will turn somthing.asp?ID=1&name=sup into something~ID~1~name~sup.htm. This way the spiders will pick up all the pages.

LinkFreeze Site

Last night, everything was working fine. Then I wake up this morning to find out that this error is on all of my aspx pages were throwing it:

I stopped IIS and deleted the temp .net files and started IIS back up. Worked for me. Here’s the path to the temp directory:

You may want to also check to make sure that the domain your .net files are in are set to 2.0 and not 1.1.

For the longest time (and still today), I have setup my web server to redirect all 404 traffic to my home page for the site. This is done by simply changing the error redirect url to “/”. The pro’s are the obvious. The cons…. well, I just found a bad one today.

Looks like one of my css files on my server got corrupted (one that wasn’t used for anything major, but was included in almost every page). When the browser tried to load the bad css file, the web server threw a 404 and redirected the request to my home page. Well, when you have a crap-load of pages being requested constantly, and they all start polling the home page as well, my server basically vomited. The worst part about it was how much of a pain in the ass it was to trouble shoot this. I hate trying to figure out what’s wrong with my web server when it’s peaked at 100% cpu. Everything takes forever… I mean, just to bring up the task manager takes about 2 minutes to right-click, and another 10 to show the window. Sheesh.

The only way I found it was by watching the individual requests going to the server when a page was being loaded. I used Firebug (Firefox plugin) for that. If you have never used / seen / or heard about firebug. Just stop what you’re doing and go get it now. It’s a gift from the gods!

Firebug Addon Get It Page

Go… get it.

I’ll wait.

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