Visual28-Personal Blog of Mark Aplet - Design, web, and other topics

I love Dreamweaver, it's my code editor of choice, but sometimes the default settings totally stink. I couldn't help but feel that space was being wasted, and that there were features missing from a seasoned application like Dreamweaver. I have picked up a few things to tweak Dreamweaver to my liking. Some things are simple, while others require a bit more wrenching under the hood. Now, anytime you go messing with core application files I highly recommend you make a copy of them first and store them in a safe location. Making a mistake could cause Dreamweaver to stop working. Though these tweaks are pretty easy, consider yourself warned.

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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.

1. stop the IIS server. Open the IIS Manager
2. Select your "Web Sites" node and right click to open it's properties.
3. Select the tab for IISPassword.
4. Check the radio button for "Create new". In the textfield for "Access File Name" change the file to .iispassword
5. Click the change button. Give it a moment to propagate for all your sites.
6. 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.