Plus Sign in IIS 7 URL

The Problem:
"Help our site has stopped working."

The Issue:
That was the email message I received last week, although the tone was more urgent and panicked. The web site hadn't stopped working but images that once showed up no longer where visible, instead the browser was showing the image not found icon or alt text. Luckily in this case I knew what part of the problem was - we had just upgraded this client's web site from an IIS5 to an IIS7 server. I just wasn't sure exactly why images were not visible on the new site.

Identify the Cause:
The first thought to come to mind was that for some unknown reason the image files were not transfered to the new computer, but this did not make sense as other images in the directory were visible on the web site. What images where not showing up and what made these images different than the others? Is soon became apparent that the images in question had been uploaded as part of a CMS and had the plus sign "+" in their name. IIS7 was doing what it should, treating file name like "image+name.gif" as "image name.gif", but IIS5 did not do so.

Easy Solution:
The fix while easy was time consuming. Writing a simple SQL statement identified 71 images with the offending symbol in their name, but it took time to find all the files on the disk and rename them.

I explained to our client what had happened and told them what characters to use for a file name.

Lesson Learned:
IIS5 allows plus signs in URL and will not treat them like spaces if a file exists that matches the URL with the plus sign - but IIS 7 is more stringent and always treats "+" as a space. Also the CMS has been modified to check incoming file names and replaces any undesirable characters with a dash "-".

Getting Relevant Content

A simple solution

How can I keep content fresh? That is a question I hear often from my clients and others in the business. There are several solutions but they usually cost either time or money. Both can be in short supply.

Since Feb 2007 Yahoo Pipes have offered a fast way to aggregate web feeds, web pages, and other services to create content which you can place on your site. While this was cool the content was placed in your page using JavaScript. Since Google and search engines will not see that content it will not improve your organic search rankings.

I recently revisited this issue because a client has a top 42 list of blogs, topical and news sites that they want to link to new content and show it on their web page. Enter Yahoo Pipes and a little .Net programming.

1. Build the Pipe, use filtering to limit content,
2. Use .Net WebRequest to get the RSS rendered version of the published Pipe (adding &_render=rss to the end of the Pipe's URL).
3. Parse the XML from the RSS and output it on your web page with the needed CSS and HTML markup to fir your pages design.
   
4. Voila - instant content.
   

Just be careful - You could wind up with content you don't want if you don't build your filters correctly. Also to improver performance you could use Caching to store the content.

I expect to keep on adjusting and tweaking this method as I monitor what is placed on my web site.

To see this in action check out the "Web Site Design Articles" area on my sites home page. They are build with a combination of web site and blog RSS or Atoms feeds.

Granted this method has trade offs. On the minus side the Pipe could return a link to a site (or content) that you don't want. On the plus side it is fast and requires less maintenance time than generating your own content (and less money than paying someone else for content) or looking for content to link to. Also on the plus side the content changes fairly frequently.

I think the pluses out weigh the minuses and I like this quick and simple solution to getting relevant and fresh content on a web site.