iFinity

My last update of the iFinity Google Analytics provider was back in December 2007 – and a lot has changed since then.  Probably the biggest change is the inclusion of a standard Analytics provider in the DotNetNuke core.  That doesn’t seem to have dented enthusiasm for the iFinity Google Analytics provider, with nearly 6,000 downloads since it’s original release and still running at a healthy rate of about 7 downloads per day.

With my work on Multi-Language Urls for DotNetNuke with the Url Master module, I have setup the Url Master demonstration site which shows how to setup language-specific sub-domains to tidy up and optimise the Urls on a DotNetNuke site.  Here’s the sub-domains created for the site:

fr.url-master.com – French language version nl.url-master.com – Dutch language version de.url-master.com – German language version ...

This is the second post in my series illustrating functionality which will be available with the release of the Url Master, version 2.0.

The previous post covered the new 404 Error Handling features, this post will discuss the new Multi-Language (ML) features that the module incorporates.

Like better 404 error handling, people using the Url Master module soon started to request support of multi-language Urls.  While Url Master 1.x versions did work perfectly well with ML sites, and shuffled the /language/xx-YY Url forwards in the path, so that it at least appeared to have a path structure related to the language, this was about all that could be achieved.

The first thing that was needed was the ability to localize Urls for a specific language, and to get the Urls to work without the /language/xx-YY stuck in the middle of the Url.

The next thing was to work out the best SEO strategy...

One of the features of early DotNetNuke was the ability to track clicks of particular links within the site.  You could work out how many people clicked on a link on a certain page.

This is one of those features which is actually of limited use these days – a good web analytics package will give you that detail, and a whole lot more.  There wasn’t even a link click report you could look at to see the result – though I have written one of these you can use.

However, the ‘LinkClick’ approach still litters the DotNetNuke framework and can get ordinary people into difficulty with their SEO efforts.

The problems with the LinkClick handler The LinkClick handler is a generic Url which looks like http://example.com/linkclick.aspx?tabid=234&moduleid=355.  It can be thought of as a generic redirector, like Microsoft used to use for everything...

404 Handling is the process of managing what happens when a visitor comes to your site and enters a Url/follows a link which isn't valid.  The correct handling of 404 errors can really mean the different between a professional looking site, and one that still looks like it is in development.  The name ‘404 Error’ is used because the web server returns a response code of ‘404’, meaning it couldn’t find a matching file/resource for the Url.

A well developed 404 strategy will retain users, keep search engines up to date and in general make your site look like a polished and finished effort.

This post takes a look at what happens when a 404 occurs, how DotNetNuke handles it, and how the new version of Url Master (2.0) can handle 404 errors.

Background on DotNetNuke 404 Error Handling. In order to discuss issues behind DotNetNuke 404 handling, it’s worthwhile to just take a background look at how DotNetNuke...