Besides the many symptoms that can cause Server Error 0; another likely one occurs when you use semicolons instead of commas to separate your category names. This causes the category to be read as one giant category, forcing a truncation at the server level.  There is an easy fix. Copy the category names into notepad, hit CTRL+H to do a Replace, and change the semicolons to commas.

It’s simple to modify the code in BlogEngine.NET to track analytics on your feeds. This is helpful if you have a variety of different topics on your site. Typically, readers will prefer to follow one particular topic – or category.  As you can see on the right hand side, SlingAlibi has a variety of different Categories – or books, as we like to think of them. 

With a little bit of customization, you can track which ones are doing well, and which ones, well, maybe it’s time to retire.

First you will have to burn a feed. By default, BlogEngine.NET will base the feed on the category name itself, such as:

http://blog.slingalibi.com/category/feed/Emirates-Hills-Chihuahua.aspx

What if we wanted to redirect that feed to an analytic engine who can examine the subscriptions and traffic to that feed?  In order to create the redirect, you’ll need to dive into the App_Code, Controls directory. There you will see a code behind file called CategoryList.cs.  Create a back up copy and then add some conditionals inside the code:

Now when your readers click on the tiny orange RSS icon next to your category, they will be redirected to the appropriate analytic engine for processing.

This week SlingAlibi has been examining ways to clean up CommentSpam.

By default, BlogEngine.NET 1.5 does not have the heavy protection from comment spam. A handy Extension like Askismet works wonders (as does the impending upgrade); however, one way to disguise your site from spammers is to see how they find your site.

A quick examination of the Analytics for this site showed how the spammer culprits determine a site is vulnerable for spam. About 4% of the traffic came from a search for “powered by blogengine.net” – in exact quotes. This is simple enough to change, while still crediting our packaged application.

Editing the Master Page

You’ll need to edit the master page for the theme you are using. For our site, we keep it simple and use the Standard theme. You’ll find this inside the Theme directory.  Open up the site.master file and change the footer text to read something else – anything else…