Reader to Reader - August 2000

[Editor's Note: Share your Windows 2000 and Windows NT discoveries, comments, problems, solutions, and experiences with products and reach out to other Windows 2000 Magazine readers (including Microsoft). Email your contributions (400 words or less) to r2r@win2000mag.com. Please include your phone number. We edit submissions for style, grammar, and length. If we print your submission, you'll get $100.]

Microsoft IIS Tip
I recently moved a company Web site inhouse from a hosting firm. During the relocation, I restructured the Web site and removed many pages. As a result, many search engines sent surfers to dead links. To redirect users to the home page, I initially decided to use the Active Server Pages (ASP) Response.Redirect function to assign the new pages the names of the nonexistent pages. This task proved to be a chore, and I was worried that I might miss a page. I discovered that the best way to direct all inquiries that referenced our domain was to change the IIS 404 error message to redirect the user to our home page. A user can input http://www.ourdomain.com/
deadweasels.htm, and still reach our homepage.

—Ephraim "Corky" Mower V
twistdpair@hotmail.com

Netscape Communicator Tips
When you encounter a JavaScript error or want to watch a command-line JavaScript processing, you can use Netscape Communicator's built-in JavaScript console. You can access this console by typing

javascript:

into the location bar. This JavaScript console is a mini HTML page. The bottom pane has the caption javascript typein. When you access this console from the location bar, you can change the caption for cosmetic reasons. For example, you can modify the caption to JAVASCRIPT typein or JaVaScRiPt typein by typing

JAVASCRIPT

or

JaVaScRiPt

You can also browse the Web from this console. To navigate to http://www .win2000mag.com/, type the following command into the JavaScript typein pane:

var d; d = window.open("http://
www.win2000mag.com/","_top")

Communicator breaks the frames in the console and loads the Windows 2000 Magazine home page into the console. The console window is resizeable, so you can maximize it when you use it as a browsing tool.

—Deepak Kumar Vasudevan
deepak@3rdagenda.com