It’s been a pretty intense week so far in what Newsnight calls “cyberspace”.
When is a secret not a secret? When it's on Twitter.
An injunction served on the Guardian and at least one other national newspaper, was meant to stop the papers reporting that the MP Paul Farrelly, had tabled a Parliamentary question about the oil traders Trafigura and its solicitors Carter-Ruck. And it succeeded - up to a point.
…
The social networking site Twitter, was soon awash with posts deploring a threat to media freedom and the reporting of Parliament.
What Trafigura and Carter-Ruck have been a victim of this week, is the combined effect of the internet interpreting censorship as damage (and routing around it), with the Streisand effect.
Barbara Streisand is one of those people who are *supermegafamous* and you know what for, but sometimes it’s hard to recall anything they’ve actually done. Her IMDB list is impressive but I try and remember seeing her in something and I mainly 404. I only really know her as Mrs Focker in ‘Meet the Fockers’.
I digress. The Streisand effect is the act of trying to suppress information but instead generates a meme. A giant, unstoppable, self perpetuating, amplifying wave of attention. Precisely because you tried to engineer the exact opposite. Babs tried to stop a photograph of her house being part of a coastal erosion study and as a result, we all know her house looks almost exactly like the one in this picture on the right. [source:wikipedia].
Oops.
There’s no doubting that it was Twitter and Wikileaks that facilitated this week’s events.
Some people say that Wikileaks could become as important a journalistic tool as the Freedom of Information Act.
I don’t doubt it for a moment. I think the rules are changing. I think they’re changing as significantly as they did when the web went mainstream in the late 90s. I think some organisations are going to find out if sunshine is the best disinfectant. I think it’s going to be interesting.
It’s also important to note that despite the media reporting this as a battle won, it isn’t over yet.
You can download the example discussed in this post here.
The default URLs from ASP.NET Webforms (and possibly even MVC) are not fantastic for SEO (Search Engine Optimisation).
You know the sort:
http://example.com/Questions/Question.aspx?ID=345
Google doesn’t really like URLs like this. It doesn’t say much about the page it represents. It might have an idea that it’s something to do with question 345 but that could mean anything. The file extension (.aspx) doesn’t help either.
What Google likes to see, is something a bit more like this:
http://example.com/questions/345/how-do-i-do-something
Well with Webforms you’re a little stuck, as the URL is dependent on the file structure of your solution and name of the files.
Unless..
..you perform some voodoo URL rewriting.
We are going to map an incoming request to a URL like this..:
http://localhost:52468/questions/1337/how-do-i-do-something
..to the default page URL like this:
http://localhost:52468/Default.aspx?ID=1337
To achieve this I’m going run through a very simple rewriting setup.
Nick has a more detailed example here and you should also check out Scott Guthrie’s post here. (N.B. My example is based on Nick’s)
First, create a standard web application:
Then download UrlRewriter from Managed Fusion. Unzip it, put the dll and pdb in a directory of your choosing and add a reference to the dll.
Next, create a new text file called ManagedFusion.Rewriter.txt and place the following in it:
In your Web.Config, add (or copy from the example) these following sections:
configuration -> configSections ->
configuration ->
configuration -> system.web -> httpModules ->
configuration -> system.webServer ->
On the opening modules tag, set runAllManagedModulesForAllRequests to true and add the RewriterModule so is becomes:
configuration -> system.webServer -> handlers ->
And that’s it!
Note that the application actually ignores the slugs at the end of the URL so your app can generate what it likes for them.
Also note that the rewrite rules can be far more complex than what is shown in the example. UrlRewriter’s rules are based on the Apache module, mod_rewrite.
Further reading:
