[thelist] Automatically generating static pages

Nik Schramm n at industriality.com
Sat Oct 12 08:13:01 CDT 2002


Hi all,

I'm working on a fully dynamic site using urls like www.site.com?a=b
which I now want to optimize for better search engine consumption. Up
until now the main seach engines such as google have not managed to
crawl the site, probably because they have been put off by these dynamic
urls.

I have toyed with using an ISAPI filter on our IIS5 server to
automatically translate search engine friendly urls like
www.site.com/a/b into something my pages will understand, but this
causes problems of absolute/relative urls in file paths and web forms
and seems a bit more drastic than I can justify.

Therefore I am currently looking into the alternative possibility of
generating static html pages from some of the main pages in my site.
That seems better, because they are not likely to change that often
anyway. Obviously that would only make sense if this process could be
fully automated, say on a daily basis.

I'm using asp.net and I could imagine achieving this by writing a few
scripts that save the output stream of a given page into a file with an
html extension and then running these scripts automatically using
Windows Scheduled Tasks or something like that.

Does that sound like a sensible plan ? Does anyone have any experience
with that ? Are there any ready-made tools available that can do this ?

Thanks

--
/nik




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