I think we all would agree that spammers must die! Okay not literally, but the spam does need to stop. I recently closed down an email address that received over 5,000 junk emails a day. I had the address for the better part of 6 years or more. Part of the spam problem was created when I put my email address online unprotected. This is a common practice still employed today because many webmasters either don't know how to munge an email address or maybe it's just too much work.
I don't believe there is a silver bullet for becoming spam free. However, in the last year or so I have done two things to curb my spam. So far it has worked nearly perfectly. I now only see one or two emails a week that are junk mail.
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In my last post I mentioned briefly that I was having a lot of problems for a few days with my site not responding, being locked out, or not linking to articles. I had a heck of a time chasing down the problem. I eventually did figure it out. The solution is pretty easy but certainly was not too obvious at first.
I am using ISAPI_Rewrite 3.0 for url rewriting. Then needed to add password protection to a folder. I hate creating accounts on windows as it's such a pain in the ass. I really liked IISPassword by IIS Tools. Unfortunately, both programs use an .htaccess file and neither one understand each other. Every time I changed one setting, it would overwrite the .htaccess file and this went back and forth for a few days.
There is a solution and I think it's pretty easy to make both applications work in harmony. IISPassword allows you to change the file where the settings are stored. They must have anticipated these types of issues and accounted for it.
To change the file used by IISPassword, simply follow these steps.
- stop the IIS server. Open the IIS Manager
- Select your "Web Sites" node and right click to open it's properties.
- Select the tab for IISPassword.
- Check the radio button for "Create new". In the textfield for "Access File Name" change the file to .iispassword
- Click the change button. Give it a moment to propagate for all your sites.
- Start IIS and thats it.
It's so easy but the docs don't mention anything about it. So if you need to password protect a folder through the system then IISPassword is a really great application and easy to use baring any issues with other .htaccess files.
If you have visited my site visual28.com in the last few days you might have noticed a lot of errors. I hope that is all behind me now. Please let me know if you do encounter any errors that I have not fixed. The cause of all this chaos was due to a lethal combination of ISAPI_Rewrite and IISPassword. Both programs were overwriting the .htaccess file and causing major headaches.
Even though I wanted to pull my hair out, I was able to correct the problem and learn a great deal about ISAPI_Rewrite in the process. Previously, I had a cobbled together system that did not work correctly for all pages. With some help of Adam Tuttle of fusiongrokker.com I was able to get my url rewrite rules all fixed up. Turns out, I had the rules correct but the order that the rules are in makes a difference in how urls are rewritten.
If your interested in using ISAPI_Rewrite to make your urls friendly to both humans and search engines. Here is what I was able to put together.
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