Encoded Ampersands (&) and Web Crawlers

I encountered a problem recently where IBM’s Omnifind Web Search Engine would not crawl internal links rendered within PersPective wiki.

Basically the problem is it could only navigate links like this:

http://someserver/somepage?param1=foo&param2=foo2

As opposed to this:

http://someserver/somepage?param1=foo&param2=foo2

 

The second version complies with XHTML 1.0 recommendations.  PersPective, like many XSLT based web renderers, is unable to render and unencoded ampersand. 

This is not good news.

My solution was to create an ASP.NET based HttpModule which filtered the output to replace the encoded ampersands.

So a  link such as:

<a href=”http://foo/wiki/perspective.aspx?action=view&amp;pagename=system:Welcome”>Click here</a>

Will be changed to:

<a href=”http://foo/wiki/perspective.aspx?action=view&pagename=system:Welcome”>Click here</a>

 

The solution works well.    My code is in VB.NET, although the article I based it on is in CSharp.  Take a look at “Producing Xhtml Compliant Pages With Response Filters” for more information.

 

The project is in Visual Studio 2003 format (.net 1.1) to match the current version of PersPective, although I’m sure it only needs a quick recompile to work with 2.0.

I’ve uploaded a zip file containing the dll and source here.  Enjoy!

PersPective Wiki Turns 3!

I have posted before about PersPective Wiki, a simple WYSIWYG wiki that to me seems to be one of the best. 

For some time the author Alan Slater has been working on a new version that promises features such as:

• New look and feel
• Fully hierarchical structure
• Advanced editor, with following features:
  • Table editing
  • Paste & Clean content from MS Word
  • Modify text & background colors
  • Spell checker
  • Insertion of wiki links by browsing
  • Image map editing
  • …
• Technical notes:
  • Database backend
  • Built in .Net 2.0
  • XHTML and CSS layout

 

Recently Alan has hosted the a version of the new software on his site  if you’d like to take a quick look.

Today he also made the Alpha available for download. 

Here’s a screenshot of the new editor:

 

(Click for more detail)

PersPective Wiki

One of my favourite wiki programs is PersPective, an open source, asp.net based wiki with a WYSIWYG editor.

The PersPective software itself is simple and elegant. PersPective stores all it’s data in xml files (another key selection criteria in the early days) utilizing a simple Xml schema. That means that the wiki is easy to backup, replicate and repair when the need arises. As a bonus, Alan Slater the author has always been helpful in extending Perspective In many cool ways. The releases of PersPective are of high quality and compatible, a tribute to Alan as a developer.

The extensibility of Perspective is also worth mentioning. It supports a facility called “Raw Includes” that allows new features to the wiki easily.  

If you’re after a good wiki, give it a try:

http://www.high-beyond.com