Cityscan Launches!

Well this month has been one of mild panic, rushing to meet deadlines (including this one ! ). Finally CITYscan (www.cityscan.co.uk) has launched, the site's hits went up to a staggering quarter of a million hits in a day with 3,500 user sessions. We held our breath and waited for the server, running IIS3 and SQL server 6.5, to grind to a halt. This machine is a twin Pentium 133, 128M of RAM with a raid controller for the scussi hard discs supplied by INSnet (www.insnet.net) and it is just sitting there coping admirably with plenty of RAM still available. No sign of a memory leak on this box at all, more than we can say of another server that we control which is running IIS3, SQL server 6.5, Exchange Server 5 and Front Page Extensions, and on which there is a constant drain on the available Ram.Trawling through the various knowledge bases to find the reason for this, as is often the case we found lots of probable answers our problem, none of which appeared to apply. Now a web server in our book should be a machine that sits in the corner of a machine room, never demanding nor needing attention. For this reason we only put the barest amount of software on the web servers, just what they need to do the job required. Then sit back and pray.

The other month we mentioned the absurd situation, that, in order to install NT option pack, which gives you all sorts of goodies, such as IIS4 Index server2, you have to install IE4 on your web server. So when the other day we received an invite to go to a meeting in London to talk to Tod Nielson who is General Manager Developer Relations at Microsoft Redmond, we took the opportunity to ask him for the rationale behind this move. He said that the reason for a complete install of IE4 was that it was difficult to split the necessary functionality out of the code at the moment, but that in future releases of NT much of IE4 and it's successors will be part of NT. There will be no need for a browser install. At this point of course IE or parts of it will become part of the OS. There were also strong rumours of a successor to the perfectly horrible and complicated Visual Studio system, with a new development tool for the heavy weight developers of the web, and about time too. Notepad and Textview have their uses but really there should be something much better from Microsoft. Visual Studio has no syntax checking for script code in html and in our opinion is about as friendly as a cornered rat. Whilst we are on the subject of IIS4, a peculiar effect we have noticed is that it appears to lock pages that are being browsed. For example you view a page, then edit it. Now try to save the edited version, an error message appears saying that you do not have rights to this file, If you then wait, the file will be deleted and then you can save you new file with the same name as the old one. Very curious!

Battling the other day with Index Server 2, we needed to change the permissions on some files which were indexed. Fine we thought, did the usual, and then re-ran web pages. To our horror the files had disappeared from the index. Apparently the permissions to files are held in the indexes of index server. So if you change the security settings of indexed files you need to delete the index with management console and recreate it. Not an onerous task but can cause some confusion if you don't know.

Paranoia

Now for paranoia corner. There are conflicting interests from the owners of commercial web sites and many of the people out there browsing. One of the charms of browsing the 'net is the anonymity offered. It has always been difficult to know who is looking at your site. Sure, it's easy enough to see what they are looking at, but how do you tell what sort of people they are and most importantly are they return visitors? Despite what is generally thought, the information that is required by the marketing departments of these commercial sites is not often your name and address so that they can call you. Rather they want to know your lifestyle and your interests so that they can build up a profile of the sort of person who is interested in their products. To achieve this end, more and more sites are using some form of user detection, usually by a combination of registration page, cookies and database lookup.

Now normally we can see no problem here, if you are interested in a company's products on the web, why not let them ask you for information. You can always enter false information should you so wish. Which brings me to another gripe of ours, please, please web designers don't force all the fields to be entered on your registration page, this is annoying and you will probably get is a string of xxxxx's or similar entered. It is much easier to remove null data from your user database than all these false combinations that users might enter.

A little note here to all you users as well, when something annoys you about a web site, by all means tell the webmaster but please be gentle, he may have had to build it that way because the client wanted it that way. We web builders really are not alien beings with a perverse sense of fun who like to make navigation difficult, nor do we all have shares in BT, so that we put large graphics on the pages to extend your on-line time. As for trying to help out poor old Microsoft/Netscape by forcing you to use their latest browser, well; we're still waiting for the cheque!

Sites that want to gather information in this way are fine in our book, you know who you are dealing with and you make the decision as to what information you are divulging. But, and it is a big but, there is a move to link up sites so that user profiling information is shared. If you visit one site and give information about yourself, that site could be passing on that information to a variety of sites. Microsoft's tool for doing all this user tracking is called Personalization Server, allowing as it does for web pages to be customised for each user. This is not just for users to set their own entry pages to a site but also so that advertisements can be targeted more accurately to the users interests. This is a great idea. After all, if we are to be subjected to adverts on web pages, it is much better that they are about things we are interested in. There is however a cautionary tale here. Mark let a friend use his machine to browse the web the other day. It was only later that he found out she was an avid Barry Manalow fan and spent all the time browsing the fan club sites. So quite what the marketing boys will make of his profile now is anybody's guess!

Personalization server we shall be covering in more depth later but one feature it does offer, which is a godsend for web designers but has some repercussions for the user, is the ability for several web sites to share a common Personalization server. This server controls the issuing of cookies and logging them against it's database of users, so that as soon as a user visits your site it will know everything that you have told it when you visited a pervious site. Now suppose a large corporation who had a large number of users looking at their site allowed other commercial sites to use their marketing information in this fashion. Data protection laws may not be of use depending where the sites are located and anyway how many times have you left that check box ticked, allowing one small company to use this data with a third party? Again if it was just profile information on the type of person visiting then there is no problem, but we are talking Names , addresses and yes we are talking telephone numbers!

The banner advertisers are getting in on this marketing idea and several companies are offering profiling of users who are clicking on their banners, so that web sites can offer adverts that more closely match the users likes and hopefully get a better 'click-through' rate on their adverts. One of the first companies in the UK offering this service is Doubleclick (www.doubleclick.com) and without doubt this is the way that advertising on the internet is moving.

User profiling through banner adverts.

All these sites rely on knowing who you are when you come into a site and mostly they use cookies to do this. If you disable cookies then other features on the site including navigating can become broken so that is not really an answer. You could start your surfing from somewhere like www.anonymizer.com which will make it look as if you are coming from their domain and also block cookies for you.

P/P>

Now you see me, now you don't!

Just as we were putting this article 'to bed'. Andy, the graphic designer from CITYscan rang and pointed us to an excellent website that analyses your HTML pages and gives advice on how to improve things. Part of this process is what they call 'Gif Lube', which will display your site images in a variety of resolutions with their respective file sizes. This site is really worth checking out at www.websitegarage.com, it is also linked from the Alta Vista Search engine home page.