DotNetNuke "Redirection limit for this URL exceeded"

Got this one yesterday when reconfiguring some portals. Solution was that I needed to create the sub directory reflecting the child portal alias I had created. This was not automatically done by DotNetNuke when adding an alias. Thus my alias was www.company.com/iberia and for http://www.company.com/iberia to operate, there should be a folder named iberia with a default.aspx page that performs a redirection into the portal system.

DotNetNuke mjj.PageElements module

This is a really handy extension to DotNetNuke which is offered free on the developers web site, including source. It lists all the sub pages as links, and you completely control the Html generated through a simple template system that requires no learning.

Unfortunately there is a bug where deleted pages are still listed. Without studying the code - most likely it needs to add "where IsDeleted=0" to the query that gets the subpages to list.

The workaround, if you don't want to get involved in maintaining code from other developers like me, is to go to the recycle bin and permanently delete the page.

Google can produce bad Url references (href) on a cached page by injecting an incorrect BASE tag

A large client site is generating a lot of invalid page reference errors when the referrer was the Google page crawler engine (Googlebot). Google injects a BASE tag into the cached version of the page. In our case, because of a redirect to a language subfolder, this was wrong. If you used Google to find the site, but clicked on the cached version you could see that relative Urls were wrong.

Now the site has it's own base tag - set to the correct subfolder. Lets see if Google will leave our base tag alone next time the page is regenerated. Hopefully it doesn't overwrite the tag with a bad path as before.

PS: sorry I didn't manage to ungeek this issue at all!

HTML quirk of the day: Italics bug with Internet Explorer

Only on some PCs and only on Windows, there is a lovely bug with italics blocks rendering too wide. On one customer site this forced the content area a few pixels, which was enough to move a whole left hand side menu down to the bottom of the page. But only on some machines. Both my colleague and I have the same IE (from Windows XPSP2). I get the problem he does not. Specifying italics in CSS instead of an HTML tag doesn't help either.

In our case forcing some line breaks was an acceptable workaround to keep the text from getting too close to the margin it was forcing too wide.

http://www.positioniseverything.net/explorer/italicbug-ie.html

You've gotta love web development.

Release of DotNetNuke 3.2 / 4.0

This flurry won't continue, but I am very excited to see that a new version of DotNetNuke was just released. I have to have a hunt to see if some of the anonymous bugs that I logged have been fixed. So far only the new features are promoted.

IIS 6.0 Authentication stopped working

Today a (virtual) machine of mine would not authenticate to an ASPX page. I would only get error 403.1 Finally found that Windows server 2003 Service pack 1 changes the integrated authentication formerly called NTLM in favor of Kerberos. I changed the joined of this new VM to a new domain based on Active Directory without created a clean build of the machine and got these strange problems. Finally found a hack to my problem in an article on Technet "Forcing NTLM Authentication (IIS 6.0)".

Note that editing the metabase in notepad to make the setting didn't work the first time. Not sure if this was because I had left the file open or entered it wrongly, or a restart was required (recall reading that a restart is not necessary).

This blog is a personal record of lessons learned - for when they happen again. I think only problems like this one that were not solved within a few google searches will get logged. Lets see...