If you have a blog that is even moderately popular then you have likely fallen victim to some form of content scraping. Ever since it became possible to earn money through ads on a website there have been people trying to find ways to cheat the system. The most widespread example of this comes in the form of splogs and similar spam-based websites, which consist only of ads from Google AdSense and duplicated content from other sites. In this post I will share a method you can use to identify "evil" spiders and bots that are wasting your website's resources. [More]

Configuration inheritance is a very robust feature of ASP.NET that allows you to set configuration settings in the Web.Config of a parent application and have it automatically be applied to all of its child applications. There are certain situations, however, when there are configuration settings that you don't want to apply to a child application. The usual course of action is to override the setting in question in the child application's web.config file, which is ideal if there are only a handful of settings to deal with. This is less than ideal when there are a significant number of settings that need to be overridden, or when you simply want the child application to be largely independent of its parent. [More]

In an ASP.NET application the web.sitemap is very convenient tool for managing the site's structure, especially when used with an asp:Menu control. One aspect of the web.sitemap that is often overlooked is the ability to add custom attributes to the <siteMapNode> elements, which provides very useful leverage for managing a site's meta-data. [More]

One of the greatest time-savers in web development is the use of dynamic pages to serve up database driven content. The most common examples of which are content management systems and product information pages. More times than not these pages hinge on a querystring parameter such as /page.aspx?id=12345 to determine which record needs to be retrieved from the database and output to the page. What is surprising is how many sites don't adequatly validate that crucial parameter. [More]

Light weight, very easy to set up, and very well-designed and organized under the hood, BlogEngine.NET is in a position to become to ASP.NET what WordPress is for PHP. [More]