[thelist] Re: Search engines and dynamic sites using query strings

Warden, Matt mwarden at odyssey-design.com
Wed Jan 31 15:38:48 CST 2001


> > It's not possible to do that exactly in 'classic' ASP (not sure about ASP
> > 3), the server returns a 404.
> > But it looks like this will be able to work in ASP.NET
> >
> > Cheers
> > mk
>
> Yeah, I noticed this and couldn't figure out how Erik was getting to step
> one of splitting the URL on the slashes, since in "classic" ASP you get the
> 404 before the script can parse the URL.

You can set IIS up to use a custom 404 Error page. See:

http://www.learnasp.com/NotAPage.asp

Charles actually has it set up so that it logs the URL into a database. Then,
he reviews the 404s and sets up redirections for the most popular 404s to the
correct page (usually misspellings and recently moved items, etc.)

> This approach seems like it would solve the problem of always getting a 404
> error in ASP before being able to split the URL on the slashes, since the
> custom 404 page does the work. One question, though: one script (the 404
> page) basically drives the entire evolt site? Doesn't that have an adverse
> impact on server performance?

Why would it? The 404 script would most likely always been in memory (and I'm
sure that CF has some nifty semi-caching features for scripts held in memory).
So, aside from it being two "requests" on the server for every one true
request from the client, it's not really that big of a deal (and, considering
that one request is on a page that's in memory, the increase is trivial).



--
mattwarden
mattwarden.com





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