Don’t Give Me No Blue Sky Rubbish

I’ve read a fair number of books on software development over the years but the one that has made the most difference to me was I. M. Wright’s ‘Hard Code’. Amazon’s summary states ‘Get the brutal truth about coding, testing, and project management—from a Microsoft insider who tells it like it is’. Fair comment.

Back in the day we had Ed Yourdon telling us all about  Death March  projects and Steve McConnell‘s Code Complete as a self defense guide to how to avoid getting stuck on one.

These days I’ve got Eric Brechner’s blog to provide me with an up-to-date insight into the software development process and it’s incumbant pitfalls. Eric’s hard bitten perspective and practical advice ought to provide enough ammunition for even the most jaded Dilbert devotee to start sorting out their:

• Career
• Project
• Manager [sic]
• Department / Company

IMHO if ‘Hard Code’ doesn’t speak to you, you’re most likely in the wrong industry.

One final cautionary note, the ‘Hard Code’ blog doesn’t deal in ‘Blue Sky Thinking’ and offers little to those looking to ‘Land their Vision’, those individuals best look elsewhere for what they seek.

ReSharper friendly Visual Studio colour scheme

Looking for a dark visual studio style that’s not high contrast, easy on the eye for all day use and best of all ReSharper friendly then take a peek at Selenitic created by Tim G. Thomas.

 

This is just one of many Visual Studio styles available for download at http://studiostyl.es/ a great community site for creating and sharing Visual Studio colour schemes.

Sitecore content tree indexed by Search Engines

Have you noticed that your Sitecore content tree may be indexed by search engines?

Try searching for “/sitecore/content/” in your favourite search engine. When I entered this into Bing the third link that I was shown was:

www.rfu.com

http://www.rfu.com/sitecore/content.aspx

Clicking on the link takes you to a Page Error message on the RFU site as there’s no layout associated with the content item. The url shown in the browser address bar is:

http://www.rfu.com/error?item=%2fsitecore%2fcontent&layout=%7b00000000-0000-0000-0000-000000000000%7d&device=Default

Presumably having content indexed by search engines under two separate url’s on a site isn’t going to be too good for your SEO rankings unless appropriate action is taken.

One way that I found of successfully dealing with this problem was to add the following to the sites robots.txt file:

User-agent: *
Disallow: /Sitecore/

Can anyone offer a good explanation of what is allowing the structure of the Sitecore CMS’s content tree to be indexed by the search engines?