Project 31-A

Every time I get a C# exception on my ASP.NET web site running in Windows Azure, I have my web site code send me an email; this email includes the call stack, path information, and user agent string. I can use these email to find the problems with the code that caused the error. For a long time I have been ignoring the email (about 50 a day) and letting them stack up – being too busy with other projects. Lately, I have resolved to clean up all the code, so that I get less email and reduce the bugs in the web site. I thought this would lead to a better user experience for people visiting the site.   My typical process is to read the call stack, look at the path information and try to reproduce the issue to gain insight into how I have to fix it. Basically, a debugging process that I have in my toolkit no matter what the environment I am programming. To get started I make sure that I am running the same browser that the user was using, be that Firefox, Internet Explorer or Goog...

Google announced that it will consider the speed of the web site as part of its search engine ranking ( Using site speed in web search ranking ) – something I suspect that it has been doing for some time. We have known for a while that page speed is very important to how the user perceives the quality of the web site. You can significantly lower your bounce rate by improving page speed – because users will look at more of your site if the first page they request returns quickly. Now, it is just not user experience that suffers from a slow site; it is site ranking on Google – which means with this announcement slow sites attract fewer viewers because your site will appear father down the search results. “Now slow performing code and slow database queries are a marketing issue.” For on of my major web site serving Google AdWords slowness means lower revenue. Page Caching On the web site serving AdWords I had some slow leaf pages (outlying lower pages with the majority of the...

I run a travel and tourist site for San Juan Island Kulshan.com .  A long time ago we wrote up reviews for all the islands, the major towns, and the high tourism attractions.  The site is structured this way:       We also create a Google Site map giving the home page has the highest priority, the islands the next highest, the cities a lower priority and the individual write-ups the lowest priority.  All pretty standard.  However, when we started to look at the reports from Google Webmaster Tools we saw something very disturbing:     We were telling Google about 220 pages, however only 93 had been indexed.  Why was this?  We presumed it was because there where no external links to the leaf pages (the individual reviews of restaurants, parks, beaches, and trails).  Google crawler was doing exactly what we asked, traverse the high priority pages in the site map and leave the low priority pages.  The leaf pag...