I’m quite pleased to see that my Interlude theme port for BlogEngine.Net is being used by someone else.

In November 2008 I converted the Interlude theme for BlogEngine.Net – it was on Free CSS Templates and I liked it, I changed bits of it here and there… but essentially it’s that template but tweaked to fit BlogEngine.Net. Shortly after that there was a request for themes for BlogEngine.Net so, feeling quite proud of my theme (I’m a developer and artistically challenged!) I submitted the theme but didn’t hear anything about the submission.

Today, after reading 5 Reasons Why You Can Use HTML5 Today I was curious to know whether BlogEngine.Net would play nicely with html5 so started looking on the BlogEngine.Net site, stumbled across the themes and thought I’d see what else there was (the selection was quite limited for a while). Lo and behold http://www.blogenginetheme.com/ a nice gallery of themes for BlogEngine.Net and I thought that theme looks pretty familiar – checked the footer and… well it’s my theme. I’m pretty pleased a site devoted to BlogEngine.Net themes has chosen to use my theme and that there 979 downloads so far!

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Ok I wanted to do a post about the IIS SEO Toolkit, but realised knew that Scott Guthrie had already done a, quite in-depth, article about the IIS Search Engine Optimisation Toolkit. But my reason wasn’t so much to try to make people aware of the extension, I just wanted to rave about it a little, so here goes…

For the last 2 days I’ve been ‘tinkering’ with the company website trying to make it a little better than before – I think I’ve done that with the help of the IIS SEO Toolkit. When we launched the new version back in February this year I ran it by the SEO Toolkit to get an idea of what issues we might have with it, there were quite a few violations flagged but we were busy at that time, so I dutifully logged a task in our system to have a look at this when we had some free time.

No one else picked up the task, so I decided to have a go at it. I re-ran the analysis, prepared for bad news and was quite gob-smacked to find it was reporting close to 40,000 violations – ouch! The company website is built using Sitefinity (the CMS system from Telerik) and we’ve got a little over 1,050 pages in the site all of which have been built by non-IT staff and use only 3 template pages. The analysis turns up 3,526 urls that it processes, so this is handling a lot of other resources as well, but 40,248 violations is a around 11 violations per page! That’s not good, not good at all.

We had over 5,000 images missing alt attributes, nearly 2,000 broken hyperlinks and 3,298 pages with invalid mark-up. After my tinkering, I’ve moved all the JavaScript to external files and linked to them at the bottom of the page, fixed all the pages with invalid mark-up and almost eliminated the missing alt attributes (there are now only 47 images without alt attributes and I’ve been in touch with Sitefinity support to request a change be made to prevent it in future). We’re currently down to 7,186 violations of which 1,666 are to do with missing descriptions (a good amount of these are the result of broken links), 726 pages with broken hyperlinks and 2,208 pages with unnecessary redirects – which are caused, again to a large degree, by broken links and some legacy stuff from before the change to the new site.

I’m pretty pleased to have fixed as much as I have so far (just over 33,000 violations), I know it’s not great having 7 thousand violations but it’s so much better than before and with a bit more work I’ll bring that down to a much more manageable quantity

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I haven’t made a post in over a month – that’s bad, but then I don’t feel that I’ve got much to say at the moment.

My posts are often made in response to something I’ve read or a problem I’ve had and (hopefully) solved that I hope will help someone else. For the last few weeks though I’ve not had any ‘tasty’ development work to get my teeth into, I finished the last chunk of development about a month ago.

I have been busy with other things though, some of them have even been to do with work but nothing that’s either finished enough to talk about or particularly interesting. Mostly minor updates to our websites or bug fixes or, increasingly, responding to emails and helping users work with systems we’ve already set up such as Google Analytics or explaining how to examine page mark-up generated from our CMS.

There are a finite number of keystrokes left in your hands before you die - Scott Hanselman

That quote from do they deserve the gift of your keystrokes suggests that maybe instead of replying to an email I should consider updating our wiki so others can benefit or check there before coming to me direct, but I quite like the human interaction sometimes – not to mention that it makes me look good being seen as the fountain of all knowledge in the eyes of others in my company.

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Isn’t it about time to ditch the “Confirm Email” field in forms? Really I don’t see any point to them any more, I suspect they only exist because that’s the way these forms have always been done.

What’s wrong with re-entering my address?

Well for one it doesn’t prevent the problem, if I’ve mistyped my address once chances are that I’ll do it again. Ok checking that both values match will reduce the chances that I mistype my email address incorrectly the same way more than once, but it doesn’t actually prevent it from happening and as most of the time I’m typing on ‘auto-pilot’ with my fingers following paths I’ve drilled into them over and over again I’d argue I’m actually more likely to re-enter the same value anyway.

It’s rude and assumes I’m not to be trusted

Making me repeat myself implies that the form doesn’t trust me to get it right first time. Now I know we’re taught to distrust all user input, but I think this takes things a bit far. I accept that the main reason this approach still exists today is error prevention but if that’s the case though shouldn’t there also be a “Confirm Name” field, after all I’m quite likely to get annoyed if communications get my name wrong and I’m just as likely to type that incorrectly.

How do I approach the form when I encounter them?

My usual approach, when I encounter confirm email fields in forms, is CTRL+A, CTRL+C, TAB and then CTRL+V, it is much quicker than typing the whole email address again. So disabling copy & paste really irritates me!

Of course that approach assumes I’ve typed my email address correctly the first time, but a) I’m pretty good at typing my email address and b) when I do make mistakes I will correct them. If it is really important that my email address is right, such as for confirmation that an online payment has happened then you can bet I’m going to double and triple check that address myself! When getting my email address right is important I will pay attention but so often my email address is needed just to fill in a form that there really isn’t any need for an email address on that I just don’t care why they want it (and I’ll give them a disposable 10 Minute Email).

What can be done about it?

There are other and better ways to confirm the email address is correct:

• The user can actually see what they’ve typed and fix it there and then
• Display a confirmation page with the option to go back and correct mistakes
• Send a confirmation email – this also confirms they have access to the email account and aren’t just signing up their friends without permission!

What about password fields

So far I think that what I’ve said would be accepted by 80%+ of web users; I’d like to go a step further and apply the same principle to password confirmation fields!

Currently when I have to set a password I’m presented with 2 text boxes that mask my entry, so I can’t see what I’ve typed. I know the reason here is to prevent someone from peeking over my shoulder and seeing what I’m typing – but I don’t think many people are that interested in accessing my bbc.co.uk account or my MSDN profile and most of the time I’m doing it I’m either at work or at home and I know the people around me and they’re too busy to care!

Personally I’d like to unmask the password box and get rid of the confirmation box; then I’ll know what I’ve typed and can correct it if I need. Or at least have a toggle option that lets me keep the old way, for when I’m using a public computer maybe, but when I’m at home just let me see my password.

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Towards the end of the yesterday an interesting bug started to show up whenever anyone went into the Modules section of the CMS  "Stack Trace: /r/nError: The server method 'GetContentItems' failed./r/nStatus Code: 500/r/nException Type: /r/nTimed Out: false". This was not good news. So I opened up Firebug and sure enough the call to that webservice was coming back with a 500 error status, looking in the Response tab all I could see was that the server was returning a 500 error status.

First things first, I tried to reproduce the problem locally but without success, everything was working fine for me. I checked the builds for Live, Staging and Development and they were all the same, but I couldn’t reproduce the error on Dev or Staging. OK, I’ve set the servers machine.config into production mode with deployment = retail, so went in and changed that. Not the best thing to do on a production server because potentially any errors would now be visible. However as I was unable to reproduce the error locally or on either the development or staging servers I didn’t have much choice. Annoyingly Firebug was still giving me the generic error page, nothing I could use to debug or see what was happening. I even gave Fiddler the chance to shine, but again all I could see was the generic error. Even though I’d disabled deployment=”retail” for the servers and set customErrors off in the application web.config I wasn’t seeing the real error. I tried to run the application locally on the production web server, but that box is locked down quite tightly and I couldn’t get it to run (even as an virtual directory from within the Default Website).

Enter ELMAH

This wasn’t going well, I needed to see the real error but couldn’t seem to get to it, the logs weren’t being very helpful either. I’ve been meaning to install ELMAH on the web server globally for a while, I even started but couldn’t get it to run, so figured I’d just quickly install ELMAH for this site only. For anyone who doesn’t know ELMAH rocks! This is what the site says about it:

Once ELMAH has been dropped into a running web application and configured appropriately, you get the following facilities without changing a single line of your code:

• Logging of nearly all unhandled exceptions.
• A web page to remotely view the entire log of recoded exceptions.
• A web page to remotely view the full details of any one logged exception.
• In many cases, you can review the original yellow screen of death that ASP.NET generated for a given exception, even with customErrors mode turned off.
• An e-mail notification of each error at the time it occurs.
• An RSS feed of the last 15 errors from the log.
• A number of backing storage implementations for the log, including in-memory, Microsoft SQL Server and several contributed by the community.

Setting it up for the site was really easy, I dropped the dll into the bin and added the relevant lines to web.config - setting it to send me emails for the errors. So back to my website and cause the problem, within seconds the first email arrived in my inbox and there was an interesting bit of information in there. The web service was being called as “getcontentitems” and not “GetContentItems”, the error was even kind enough to explain that method names are case sensitive.

The penny drops

At this point I remembered that we’d installed the URL Rewrite module for IIS at work earlier this week in order to fix up some issues the SEOToolkit was reporting. As well as the canonical url issue of missing ‘www’ from our urls we’d wanted to enforce lowercase urls. Personally I prefer seeing SentenceCase on urls but if this causes SEO issues then as it is only a matter of taste I saw no reason not to lowercase everything by the URL Rewrite module and then it doesn’t matter what file name authors give to their pages. We had added a rule at server level to lowercase everything, set up rules at application level to enforce the www in urls and got on with other things. All was good when we did this and no one was complaining about broken functionality. Clearly this was the cause of our problems and explained why we weren’t seeing this elsewhere.

So we deleted the rule and refreshed the CMS, no more errors, problem solved! I’m getting emails quite often still and am tempted to divert these to the Helpdesk system so it can log them and we’ll work on them as and when there’s time. I also need to look into ELMAH a bit more to enable filtering so it only sends an email if a certain type of error occurs more than say 10 times in 10 minutes so we’re not bombarded with emails.

Warning

For anyone rewriting their urls be careful it may break things that are case sensitive!

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