Jack @ ASP.NET

Sometimes when you’re having trouble with an ASP.NET site, the problem turns out to not be ASP.NET itself. Here’s the top three issues and their causes. This category are for cases that were concluded because of external reasons and are outside of the control of support to directly affect. The sub categories are 3rd party software, Anti-virus software, Hardware, Virus attacks, DOS attacks, etc.

If you’ve ever run a production website you know there’s always that argument about whether to run anti-virus software in production. It’s not like anyone’s emailing viruses and saving them to production web servers, but you want to be careful. Sometimes IT or security insists on it. However, this means you’ll have software that is not your website software trying to access files at the same time your site is trying to access them.

Here’s the essence as a bulleted list

• Concurrency while under pressure: This causes problems in big software. Make sure your anti-virus software is configure appropriately and that you’re aware of which processes are accessing which files, as well as how, why and when
• Profile your applications: .NET and the Web are not black boxes. You can see what’s happening if you look. Know what bytes are going out the wire. Know who is accessing the disk. Measure twice, cut once, they say? I say measure a dozen times. You’d be surprised how often folks put an app in production and they’ve never once profiled it.
• Anti-Virus Software: It can’t be emphasized enough that site owners should ensure they are running the latest AV engine and definitions from their chosen anti-malware vendor. They’ve see folks hitting hangs due to flakey AV drivers that are over two years out of date.  Another point about AV software is that it is not just about old-school AV scanning of file access. Many products now do low level monitoring of port activity, script activity within processes and memory allocation activity and do not always do these things 100% correctly. Stay up to date!
• Know where you’re calling out to: Also, connection to remote endpoints: calling web services, accessing file systems etc. All of this can slow you down if you’re not paying attention. Is your DNS correct? Did you add your external hosts to a hosts file to remove DNS latency? 
• processModel autoconfig=true: This is in machine.config and folks always mess with it. Don’t assume that you know better than the defaults. Everyone wants to change the defaults, add threads, remove threads, change the way the pool works because they think their textboxes-over-data application is special. Chances are it’s not, and you’d be surprised how often people will spend days on the phone with support and discover that the defaults were fine and they had changed them long ago and forgotten. Know what you’ve changed away from the defaults, and know why.

There are feature in IE8 (some of which are in older Internet Explorers as well) that have been around but never got the attention it deserved. I am going to go threw some of the futures that you may not know about below.

ctrl+Q: See a thumb nail view of all your Tabs simply by hitting control Q on your keyboard (Ctrl+Q). Seeing how most people are visual this will allow you to work quicker and more efficient.

Click on the tab you want or press Control Q again to go back to the tab you were on.

Close the tabs by clicking on the “X” in the upper right hand corner.

Right click to see what other options you can do with the tab.

Full screen: IE8 comes with only a favorites bar and an area for the tabs, however some people like to install different tool bars that may clutter the top of there browser. Hit the “F11” key on your keyboard to toggle the page in and out of full screen.

Move the mouse to the top of the screen to see the rest of the browser the scroll bar is till on the right.

Alt+Tab will move you through windows while Ctrl+Tab will move you through tabs.
Ctrl+W will close your tab while
Ctrl+T will open a new tab.
And of course you can use the above Ctrl+Q to see all your tabs.

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Improved Zoom: With enhanced resolution and readability, Zoom allows for automatic scaling of a page’s content while maintaining the site’s intended layout. You can read very large or very small pages more clearly without having to scroll back and forth.

Press Ctrl+Mouse Role (if your mouse has this ability) to zoom in or out.

If your mouse does not do this Press Ctrl++ and Ctrl+-. (Control and Plus or control and Minus) With this feature and the last who will ever needs glasses anymore.

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Tab Grouping: Tab Grouping makes it easier to stay organized while browsing multiple webpages. Tabs that are opened from other tabs now have the same visual representation, and you can save time by closing a set of related tabs as a group by simply right-clicking. You also can right-click on a tab to close tab groups, ungroup a single tab, clone a tab, re-open a previously closed tab, or even open a new tab all together.

Home Tabs: In the morning when you open up your browser instead of opening up one tab with one Web site, open up as many as you want.

Go to the Tools->Internet Options and in the “Home Page” section type in the URL of each site you want to open in a separate tab on a separate line.

Suggeste d Sites: If you love that site, try this one. That’s the idea behind Internet Explorer 8′s new Suggested Sites feature. At your request, Internet Explorer 8 can use your browsing history to suggest other sites you may like or find useful. It’s another way that Internet Explorer 8 helps you utilize the web to its full potential.

This is a simple WebSlice. Simply click to find out what other things may interest you you.

Smart Address Bar: Internet Explorer 8 helps you find where you want to go as you type the address of your desired website.

By using Windows Search for faster performance and a richer return of information, the Smart Address Bar offers useful suggestions from your browsing history, favorites, and feeds.

Type single words into the Smart Address Bar, and they will be matched to simple domain names, making web surfing fast and efficient.

In Private Browsing: Stop worrying about your information being stored on a Public computer. With industry-leading security features like InPrivate, you can browse and shop confidently using Internet Explorer 8, wherever you go on the web, knowing you have control over the protection of your personal information. Safety, trust, and reliability has always been IE’s number one concern.

Domain Highlighting: When you visit a site, its domain is highlighted in the Address Bar. This helps alert you to websites that are imposters of trusted sites, This will reduce the chance of compromising your personal information.

Take a look next time and make sure the site you want is the site you are on.

.Cross Site Scripting Filter: Check out the command bar (picture) for all the different safety  controls you have command over. Stay safer online and help protect yourself from malicious software running on compromised websites with the Cross Site Scripting Filter.

Compatibility View: Are some sites that you are going to looking weird, this is because the site you are visiting has not been updated in a while. Now you can easily display websites that were designed for older browsers. Simply press the Compatibility View button if you see display problems on a website like misaligned text, images, or text boxes

The IIS Search Engine Optimization (SEO) Toolkit is an IIS7 extension that helps identify search engine and user experience optimizations for Web sites. The following features are included:
Site Intelligence

• Reporting and error identification for broken/invalid links, duplicate content, tag validation, etc.
• Visibility into user routes, referring pages and other patterns
• Drilldown into page resource usage and load time

Search Relevance

• Best practice rules for optimizing URL structure for search engines
• Extensibility model to enable integration for keyword acquisition
• Automatic generation of search engine support files like sitemaps and robots.txt

Key Features including

• Improve the volume and quality of traffic to your Web site from search engines
• Control how search engines access and display Web content
• Inform search engines about locations that are available for indexing
• Site Analysis Features
• Robots Exclusion Features
• Sitemap and Sitemap Index Features

 

Instructions

You will need to run the installation package as an administrator. This can be accomplished by one of the following methods:

• Logging in to your server as an administrator account and then double-clicking on the MSI file.
• Logging on using an account with administrator privileges and opening a command-prompt by right-clicking the Command Prompt menu item that is located in the Accessories menu for Windows programs and selecting "Run as administrator", then typing one of the commands listed below:
  msiexec /I IISSEO_x86.msi
  msiexec /I IISSEO_x64.msi

It takes less than 5 minutes to download and run the SEO Toolkit Analyzer against your web-site.  You simply point the tool at the top-level URL of your web-site, and then it will automatically crawl your site like a search engine would – following each link, reviewing the HTML on each page, and generating a human friendly report of every SEO or content violation it finds on the site – along with suggestions on how to fix each of them.

If you haven’t downloaded the SEO Toolkit and used it to analyzer your web-site yet, then spend 10 minutes now and give it a try.  You’ll find it provides a really easy, automated way to quickly find and identify SEO issues you have on your web-site – along with suggestions on how to fix them.  Fixing them will increase the traffic and visitors to your web-site.

Alexa Rank is a ranking system which bases on the level of traffic that each site receives from the number of people who visit it. So the more the number of traffic you get from your visitor, the more you’ll rank well in Alexa. How you can check your site rank in alexa is simply go to Alexa home page site and search for your own site.

In order to increase your Alexa ranking you must be proactive in your strategies and plan your steps carefully to succeed. With the right Alexa ranking you can demand higher prices from current advertisers and attract new advertisers just the same. If you want to increase your Alexa ranking, there are a few things you can do right now to get there. Remember in order to move up in your alexa rank, you have to bump someone out. You are competing for someone else’s ranking and you better be willing to do what it takes to achieve a higher ranking.

1. The most basic step is install the Alexa toolbar or Firefox?s SearchStatus extension. Then you can set your blog as your homepage.
2. Put up an Alexa rank widget on your homepage. Maybe it?s a little annoying but trust me this step is very important. I?ve doing this, and in just couple days my Alexa Rank get raised for about 30%.
3. Call your friends or your family, ask them to review and rate your Alexa website profile.
4. Make a post about Alexa. It could be ?100 tips and tricks to increasing your Alexa Rank?, ?Increasing Your Alexa Rank in just 3 Seconds?, etc. Make sure you make an attractive title for your post. Your post will attract many bloggers and webmasters to read. If your post has certain quality, don?t be surprised if you get some juicy backlinks from them.
5. Make useful articles then promote it on social networking websites. You can also promote it on many webmaster forums, such as Promo Junkie, Digital Point, etc.
6. Make a cool and useful tool and post it on your blog. It can be a webmaster tools, etc. One of the good examples is TechCrunch’s YouTube Downloader. If your tool very useful, it will make visitors revisit to your website frequently.
7. Make sure you Dugg or Stumbled your fresh post.
8. Buy paid-traffic. Did you know that you can buy a thousand traffics at DigitalPoint as cheap as $1? Make sure that you pick a trustful traffic seller. You can also buy advertisements from Google, Adengage, etc. It’s cheap and very useful.
9. If you want to use a free one, try Alexa auto-surfs. You can search it on Google. Try to use a good one.
10. The last tips could be a little blackhat, so I don’t recommended it. The trick is by using your social network account on MySpace, Facebook, Friendster, etc. Use attractive pictures and link them to your redirected Alexa URL. Yes, just that simple.

Have a try ~ ~