Dear super computer geeks and masters of all things technical I wonder if you can help. A friend has very kindly written my website for me, but being a super dad of three under 5’s, he has little time to revisit his wonderful creation to titivate. Would you have any tips for getting my blog postings to be linkable as individual posts rather than the whole page? It is written in aspx if that makes a difference. Thank you in advance Nic x
lol… It’s a great looking website http://illuminephotos.com/main.aspx?action=blog What sort of control do you have over the website? The problem isn’t with the aspx (C#), it’s with the way the front end markup is used (the HTML & JavaScript.. or in this case, just the XHTML) The links of each blog post, do actually have their own URLs: http://illuminephotos.com/blog.aspx?p=bfda0908-1589-4400-8ac7-20ec4c81f7d1 http://illuminephotos.com/blog.aspx?p=d306318e-8bd2-4b1f-845f-ed1acbe46c8a http://illuminephotos.com/blog.aspx?p=1ad56eae-0873-4c51-bce7-e40e23072dcb (These URLs aren’t very human friendly, but use a 32 bit uuid (universal unique identifier) … they are also redirected) When you click on the links on your site, the content loads within an iframe (consider an iframe like a little window) within the same page. In this case, the iframe use is not ideal, since you want user friendly URLs that you can send out to everyone for each blog post. A few reasons you’ll want human friendly URLs when you click on the links 1) It’s easy to send the URL to friends or other people to find (or to tweet) 2) From the URL alone, people should be able to tell what the content is about 3) Spiders that crawl websites retrieve the URL, these URLs are consider in part of the algorithm when ranking sites in the SERPs (search engine results page.. for the most part: aka Google) 4) It’s also important to have 1 URL per Blog to allow the API requests for things like twitter counts, e.g. for this page, the API returns: http://urls.api.twitter.com/1/urls/…/getting-link-to-a-particular-post-aspx.1177/ This SurreyForum page does not have a particularly good count So having said this, for this to happen on your site, you’ll need to ask the developer to remove the blog entries from the iframes (just put them in a div). It’s a minimal markup change (but might be harder to do with what ever framework its using), and this will allow you to have 1 easily accessible URL per Blog entry (but wont solve the human-friendly URL issue) As a photographer, you probably don’t want to know all this, you just want things to work (and not have to worry about it ) For you, for now… to get the URLs of each blog post, and since I know you use a Mac/Safari, do the following: 1) Open your blog area: http://illuminephotos.com/main.aspx?action=blog 2) Right click the blog title link, and select "open in new window" >> at the top of the page… there you will have the URL to the individual blog entry
Wow Mike thank you for taking the time to give such a generous and lengthy response. I have access to the code (Azz gets very nervous about that lol) so I will have a look and see if it is obvious where I need to put Div…….let’s hope I don’t bring the whole thing crashing down lol Oh and I DO want to know this. I am only part geek and learning a new language starting at year way above 0 is proving wee bit tricky. Now – where to start looking……. Thank you so, so much
Do you have a test server (some where you can make changes, before seeing the changes on the live environment?), if you don’t I would wait for Azz to get back to you It can take 5 seconds to break something, and hours debug and get it back if you don’t know where the changes are.
You mean I can’t have a tinker – spoil sport. OK I will message Azz and impress him with me new found knowledge Thanks again.
