Programming

It turns out when working on a .NET Core project, Nuget has problems restoring/downloading packages. On other projects using an older version of the .net framework, this doesn’t seem to happen. This happens in the office at work because we use a proxy. So to get around the problem, we need to configure Nuget to go through the proxy.

Edit the NuGet.config file located at C:\Users\\AppData\Roaming\NuGet. If you’re browsing to that folder, remember to turn on “Show hidden files, folders, and drives”.

<configuration>
    <config>
        <add key="http_proxy" value="http://www.proxy.domain:port" />
        <add key="http_proxy.user" value="thedomain\userName" />
        <add key="http_proxy.password" value="base64encodedpassword" />
    </config>
</configuration>

If your work policy enforces password reset at a regular interval, it’s better to omit the password key from the config and Nuget will still be able to use your default credentials. So you end up with this instead:

<configuration>
    <config>
        <add key="http_proxy" value="http://www.proxy.domain:port" />
        <add key="http_proxy.user" value="thedomain\userName" />
    </config>
</configuration>

Now that this is sorted, let me get back to adding more nuget packages to my project.

When I initially set up Team City at work, I’ve used localhost on Port 85 as the default Port 80 was already assigned to a default Website in IIS. However not many people have access to the server where the site was running and they couldn’t change build configuration and check detailed error logs. So I wanted to use Application Request Routing (ARR) to forward incoming requests from teamcity.app.branch.local to localhost:85 where Team City was set up to listen to.

I found an MSDN article with very detailed instructions and I followed the steps carefully. It was well explained across 3 webpages (so kudos to the author) and dealt with things like the initial forwarding using inbound/outbound rules, fixing the problem with http compression and dealing with rewriting anchor tags and form action links.

It all worked fine and I was really happy until I saw a message in Team City telling me there was a problem with Web Sockets. After some Googling, it turns out there’s no easy way around it, so I decided to revert the changes I made for ARR in IIS and just updated the Server URL in Team City (Administration -> Server Administration -> Global Settings) and was able to access the UI through teamcity.app.branch.local:85.

The way ARR works as I understand it is that it forwards requests from a domain to another web app. Since teamcity.app.branch.local DNS was pointing to a particular server and running on Port 80, which in my case was the default website in IIS 8.5, I believe you could only add the following rewrite rules in Web.config without having to go through all the steps in the link above:

<system.webServer>
	<rewrite>
		<rules>
			<rule name="ReverseProxyInboundRule1" stopProcessing="true">
				<match url="(.*)" />
				<action type="Rewrite" url="http://localhost:85/{R:1}" />
				<serverVariables>
					<set name="HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_ACCEPT_ENCODING" value="{HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING}" />
					<set name="HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING" value="" />
				</serverVariables>
			</rule>
		</rules>
		<outboundRules>
			<rule name="ReverseProxyOutboundRule1" preCondition="ResponseIsHtml1">
				<match filterByTags="A, Form, Img" pattern="^http(s)?://localhost:85/(.*)" />
				<action type="Rewrite" value="http{R:1}://teamcity.app.branch.local/{R:2}" />
			</rule>
			<rule name="RestoreAcceptEncoding" preCondition="NeedsRestoringAcceptEncoding">
				<match serverVariable="HTTP_ACCEPT_ENCODING" pattern="^(.*)" />
				<action type="Rewrite" value="{HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_ACCEPT_ENCODING}" />
			</rule>
			<rule name="AnchorTagRule" preCondition="ResponseIsHtml1">
				<match pattern="href=(.*?)http://localhost:85/(.*?)\s" />
				<action type="Rewrite" value="href={R:1}http://teamcity.app.branch.local/{R:2}" />
			</rule>
			<rule name="FormActionRule">
				<match pattern="action=(.*?)http://localhost:85/(.*?)\\" />
				<action type="Rewrite" value="action={R:1}http://teamcity.app.branch.local/{R:2}\" />
			</rule>
			<preConditions>
				<preCondition name="ResponseIsHtml1">
					<add input="{RESPONSE_CONTENT_TYPE}" pattern="^text/(.+)" />
				</preCondition>
				<preCondition name="NeedsRestoringAcceptEncoding">
					<add input="{HTTP_X_ORIGINAL_ACCEPT_ENCODING}" pattern=".+" />
				</preCondition>
			</preConditions>
		</outboundRules>
	</rewrite>
</system.webServer>

The above will forward request from teamcity.app.branch.local to localhost:85 so change the URLs according to your requirements. It’s as simple as this. The steps in the MSDN article will create those inbound/outbound rules in Web.config but I don’t think you need to go through all those steps, just make sure you’ve got ARR and URL Rewrite installed on your server, that’s it.

I wanted to integrate a .net chat application for my Mauritius Chat project and came across Jabbr which has most if not all of the features I wanted. However it works with SQL Server Express by default but I wanted to use MySql instead. The reason for that is that I’ve got a dedicated where I’m running MySql because it’s free compared to SQL Server 2008/2012 and I didn’t want another service for SQL Server Express to run just for one application – I have to use the limited RAM carefully. So this post is all about how I finally managed to do that.

First thing first – you have to download the source code from Jabbr repository on Github, There’s a Download Zip button on the left hand side.

Next you’ll need to download the MySql .Net Connector 6.9.3 and install it. If you have previous versions of the MySql .Net connector, like I did, you’ll have to uninstall that first.

These are the changes you’ll need in your web.config file:

Connection String

<connectionStrings>
<add name="Jabbr" providerName="MySql.Data.MySqlClient" connectionString="Database=Jabbr;Port=3203;Data Source=localhost;User Id=YourUserName;Password=YourPassword;"/>
</connectionStrings>

Entity Framework

<entityFramework codeConfigurationType="MySql.Data.Entity.MySqlEFConfiguration, MySql.Data.Entity.EF6">
<defaultConnectionFactory type="System.Data.Entity.Infrastructure.SqlConnectionFactory, EntityFramework" />
<providers>
<provider invariantName="MySql.Data.MySqlClient" type="MySql.Data.MySqlClient.MySqlProviderServices, MySql.Data.Entity.EF6" />
<provider invariantName="System.Data.SqlClient" type="System.Data.Entity.SqlServer.SqlProviderServices, EntityFramework.SqlServer" />
</providers>
</entityFramework>

You will also need to reference the MySql.Data.Entity.EF6.dll in your project. You will find that where the MySql .Net Connector has been installed and you will have to choose the assembly according to the .net version you’re using, in my case .net 4.5.

Problems I encountered

When you recompile the project, you’d think it will work but for me it didn’t because it kept complaining about this error:

Schema specified is not valid. Errors:
(15,12) : error 2019: Member Mapping specified is not valid. The type ‘Edm.DateTimeOffset[Nullable=False,DefaultValue=,Precision=]’ of member ‘When’ in type ‘JabbR.Models.Attachment’ is not compatible with ‘MySql.timestamp[Nullable=False,DefaultValue=,Precision=0]’ of member ‘When’ in type ‘CodeFirstDatabaseSchema.Attachment’.
(40,12) : error 2019: Member Mapping specified is not valid. The type ‘Edm.DateTimeOffset[Nullable=True,DefaultValue=,Precision=]’ of member ‘RequestPasswordResetValidThrough’ in type ‘JabbR.Models.ChatUser’ is not compatible with ‘MySql.timestamp[Nullable=True,DefaultValue=,Precision=0]’ of member ‘RequestPasswordResetValidThrough’ in type ‘CodeFirstDatabaseSchema.ChatUser’.
(66,12) : error 2019: Member Mapping specified is not valid. The type ‘Edm.DateTimeOffset[Nullable=False,DefaultValue=,Precision=]’ of member ‘When’ in type ‘JabbR.Models.ChatMessage’ is not compatible with ‘MySql.timestamp[Nullable=False,DefaultValue=,Precision=0]’ of member ‘When’ in type ‘CodeFirstDatabaseSchema.ChatMessage’.
(95,12) : error 2019: Member Mapping specified is not valid. The type ‘Edm.DateTimeOffset[Nullable=False,DefaultValue=,Precision=]’ of member ‘LastActivity’ in type ‘JabbR.Models.ChatClient’ is not compatible with ‘MySql.timestamp[Nullable=False,DefaultValue=,Precision=0]’ of member ‘LastActivity’ in type ‘CodeFirstDatabaseSchema.ChatClient’.
(96,12) : error 2019: Member Mapping specified is not valid. The type ‘Edm.DateTimeOffset[Nullable=False,DefaultValue=,Precision=]’ of member ‘LastClientActivity’ in type ‘JabbR.Models.ChatClient’ is not compatible with ‘MySql.timestamp[Nullable=False,DefaultValue=,Precision=0]’ of member ‘LastClientActivity’ in type ‘CodeFirstDatabaseSchema.ChatClient’.

Basically in the Jabbr code, some of the properties (especially for DateTime) are marked as DateTimeOffset which is stores the date/time as an offset of UTC, rather than the server date/time. However the DateTimeOffset type was being mapped to datetime in MySql and Entity Framework realised it was not a proper mapping. I tried to check for solutions online but couldn’t find any and since this was not a big deal for me (storing the date/time as UTC), I ended up replacing the properties marked as DateTimeOffset as DateTime. When you do this, you also have to modify some parts of the code where it uses DateTimeOffset.UtcNow with just DateTime.Now. I’ve used replace/find and there are less than 5 occurrences if I remember correctly.

Okay at this point, the application compiles but when browsing the site, the application tells me that there’s not database/matching tables yet so I would need to use the Package Manager Console and run the command Update-Database. When I did that, it failed at one specific migration. So I tried to see what was happening by issuing a Update-Database -verbose command and I noticed MySql was complaining about a variable was not declared. That specific migration to was to rename a column from Proivder to Provider, something like that. So I thought I could just exclude that particular migration and do the rename manually but the migration still failed at another point.

I therefore decided to delete the whole Migrations folder so that the schema is created from what’s in the code without having to run it any migrations (this is only good if you’re just setting up the website and you don’t have any data yet). I had to comment out the Migration calls in Startup.cs and run the following command in Package Manager Console: Update-Database

I also issued Enable-Migrations so that if I make any changes, then these are tracked.

In the end, I was able to run Jabbr chat with a MySql database. Now I need to create a custom membership provider so that logins details are checked against the Users table which resides in another project, so I might need to create an API for that.

At home, I usually work on personal projects and I wanted an easy way to back up my data and put my code under source control. I decided to go with Git for this and use my 250Gb external hard drive for the remote repository (you can use a USB flash drive as well if you want).

So the first thing to do is download Git Extensions and install the software. I installed mine on the C drive in Windows 7 using the default settings.

The next thing was to let Git know where my local repo for my project is. So I browsed to the folder where my project was located (the directory which contains all the C# source files from Visual Studio) and right click. This gives you the option for “Git Init here” which when chosen creates .git directory marking this folder as your local working directory. Open your Git Extensions program and do a commit to get your codes under source control (locally).

Once that is done, you’ll need to create a remote repository on your external hard drive or USB stick. Just create a folder there eg H:\Git\MyProject and when you right click in the folder, you will be able to click on the “Git Bash” option which will open a command line tool. Type the following command in there:

git init –bare

This will create a bare repository in the current directory.

Go back to Git Extensions and do a push now. It will ask you where to push to and you just need to enter the location of the remote repo you’ve just created and voila, all done.

Notes

Although I was able to set up the local repo using Git Extensions, I was not able to do the same for the remote repo, hence I’ve used the command line in Git Bash.

The local repo contains all your source code (it’s a working copy after all) but the remote one has only git files. My local repo was 8Mb while the remote one was only 0.5Mb so I was worried it was not a proper backup of my data. However that was not the case – I tried to get another working copy from the remote repo just to make sure that if my computer crashed, I would still be able to get all my source codes from the external drive and that worked perfectly. Actually it’s better because the size of the remote repo backup was way less than the working copy.

After spending like 4hrs trying to find out why a dynamic property was not being loaded properly on a webpage, I finally stumbled upon a website with such an easy solution. Basically we had a custom dynamic property which was supposed to output some data but EPiServer was not rendering the control properly.

In the source code, I expected to find :

<a style=”” href=”/Video/Vimeo/60255727/” class=”trigger-video” data-trackingid=”&lt;a href=”><span></span>
<img src=”/Global/PersonalCover-Screengrab.jpg” alt=”Personal cover” />
</a>

…but here’s what I saw instead:

<div data-classid=”b30218a7-77fc-43dd-a844-81935aa9b35e” data-dynamicclass=”Video Plugin” data-state=”VgBpAGQAZQBvAEkAZAA=&amp;NgAwADIANQA1ADcAMgA3AA==|VAByAGEAYwBrAGkAbgBnAEkAZAA=&amp;PABhACAAaAByAGUAZgA9ACIAIgAgAG8AbgBjAGwAaQBjAGsAPQAiAF8AZwBhAHEALgBwAHUAcwBoACgAWwAnAF8AdAByAGEAYwBrAEUAdgBlAG4AdAAnACwAIAAnAFYAaQBkAGUAbwAnACwAIAAnAFAAbABhAHkAJwAsACAAJwBQAGUAcgBzAG8AbgBhAGwAQwBvAHYAZQByACcAXQApADsAIgA+AFYAaQBkAGUAbwAgAGwAaQBuAGsAIABoAGUAcgBlADwALwBhAD4A|SQBtAGEAZwBlAFUAcgBsAA==&amp;LwBHAGwAbwBiAGEAbAAvAFAAZQByAHMAbwBuAGEAbABDAG8AdgBlAHIALQBTAGMAcgBlAGUAbgBnAHIAYQBiAC4AagBwAGcA|SQBtAGEAZwBlAEEAbAB0AA==&amp;UABlAHIAcwBvAG4AYQBsACAAYwBvAHYAZQByAA==|QQBsAGkAZwBuAFIAaQBnAGgAdAA=&amp;” data-hash=”jpJE7dVU4KCYCarsF+2bNaNENaNdJwG1niTwbyZc7CY=” contentEditable=”false” class=”epi_dc”><div class=”epi_dc_h”><div class=”epi_dc_l”><div class=”epi_dc_title”>Video Plugin</div></div><div class=”epi_dc_t”><a href=”#” class=”epi_dc_editBtn”>.</a><a href=”#” class=”epi_dc_previewBtn”>.</a></div></div></div>

EPiServer was not rendering the control properly but was just outputting the string.

The fix is really easy. All I had to do was change the way the dynamic content is being output in code.

So instead of this:

<%= CurrentPage.MyDynamicContent %> // wrong

I used this:

<EPiServer:Property runat=”server” PropertyName=”MyDynamicContent” />

Note that this is the way to render dynamic content in EPiServer but there’s a way you can force the literal output as well to work.

So I’ve recently joined this company and they use EPiServer as a base and build custom functionality on top of that. Therefore I was required to learn how the CMS works in order to fulfill my role as a .NET Web Developer.

The very first thing I needed to do was to get a dev version on my local machine.  On Episerver’s website, I downloaded the version we used most in the company (EPiServer CMS 6 R2) and then I launched the installation process. The setup did not go smoothly as it got aborted because it could not create the database. My Windows credentials were not given the right permission on MS SQL Express 2012 (blame the System Administrator!). Anyway, once that got sorted, I installed the Alloy Tech sample website from EPiServer Deployment Centre. However that was just a blank project with just core files, contrary to what I was expected to see. The thing is I was following a tutorial from a blog and it had screenshots of what the website was supposed to look like but the end result for me was completely different. Later I found out the blog was outdated.

Next it was time getting used to Page Types, something that the CMS uses a lot. Once you get an understanding of that, everything else starts to make more sense. Then comes the querying of the CMS, for example, search for a a list of specific page type starting from the homepage. You can achieve this by creating a criteria query or using PageTypeBuilder (PTB), the latter being more strongly typed. Note that PTB is an open source project which needs to be imported in the project before you can use its awesomeness.

So far so good but still a long way before mastering the CMS; the coding is the easy one 🙂

To generate charts on the fly, you can leverage the MsChart feature of ASP.Net and it’s a free component which makes it even more cool. Everything was working fine on my development machine which has Windows 7 and using .net framework 4.0 and IIS 7.5. However when I uploaded the files to the production server, the chart was not rendering on the live website and it took me the whole day yesterday (12 hours straight on) to fix the problem. I’ve been on lots and lots of blogs, forums and other websites trying to find a solution to my problem but I had inadvertently created a bug myself. Since you need at least 2 data points to create a chart, I inserted a line of code which would see if there were at least 2 data points before creating the chart, otherwise to return null and that was my biggest mistake. Since many people have reported problems with their asp.net charts not showing up, I find myself obliged to share my experiencing in getting yours fixed.

Which .net framework are you using?

In .net framework 4.0, the charting library has been included. For the 3.5 version, you may be required to have the following dlls in your bin folder:

using System.Web.UI.DataVisualization;
using System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting;
using System.Drawing;

Remember on your dev machine, sometimes those assemblies are already in the GAC but not necessarily on your production servers. It is also worth mentioning the DataVisualization is located in the System.Web.DataVisualization dll (not the omission of UI in the namespace).

Set privateImages to false in your appSettings

In the web.config appSettings key, you might need to turn off privateImages because it is true by default and if the request is not authorised, the images won’t be displayed.

<add key="ChartImageHandler" value="storage=memory;deleteAfterServicing=true;privateImages=false;timeout=20;"/>

Explicitly define the ChartImg.axd http handlers in your web.config

The code below shows the main sections where the configurations need to be added:

<appSettings>
<add key="ChartImageHandler" value="storage=memory;deleteAfterServicing=true;privateImages=false;timeout=20;"/>
 </appSettings>

 <system.web>
 <compilation debug="true" targetFramework="4.0">
 <assemblies>
 <add assembly="System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31BF3856AD364E35"/>
 </assemblies>
 </compilation>

 <httpHandlers>
 <add path="ChartImg.axd" verb="GET,HEAD,POST" type="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler, System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" validate="false" />
 </httpHandlers>

 <controls>
 <add tagPrefix="asp" namespace="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting"
 assembly="System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
 </controls>
 </system.web>

 <system.webServer>
 <validation validateIntegratedModeConfiguration="false" />
 <handlers>
 <remove name="ChartImageHandler" />
 <add name="ChartImageHandler" preCondition="integratedMode" verb="GET,HEAD,POST" path="ChartImg.axd" type="System.Web.UI.DataVisualization.Charting.ChartHttpHandler, System.Web.DataVisualization, Version=4.0.0.0, Culture=neutral, PublicKeyToken=31bf3856ad364e35" />
 </handlers>
 <system.webServer>

Ignore routes to the chart image handler in your MVC

The MVC routing system may be messing up with your chart image handler sometimes. Many people have had success by ignoring the routes to the url where the charts are created, eg:

routes.IgnoreRoute("ChartImg.axd/{*pathInfo}");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{controller}/ChartImg.axd/{*pathInfo}");
routes.IgnoreRoute("{controller}/{action}/ChartImg.axd/{*pathInfo}");

How to use MsChart in your MVC application

In your view, you just need a an image tag with a url to your controller method which generates the chart as follows:

<img src="/chart/generate/1" alt="chart" />

And in your ChartController:

public FileContentResult Generate(int? id)
 {

// Repository.GetData(id);

List<int> gisData = new List<int>();
 gisData.Add(80);
 gisData.Add(50);
 gisData.Add(95);
 gisData.Add(67);
 gisData.Add(88);

var chart = new Chart();
 chart.Width = 800;

var area = new ChartArea();
 area.AxisY.Maximum = 100;
 area.AxisX.Title = "Attempts";
 area.AxisY.Title = "Points";
 chart.ChartAreas.Add(area);

// create and customize your data series.
 var series = new Series();
 int count = 0;
 foreach (int item in gisData)
 {
 count++;
 series.Points.AddXY(count, item);
 }
 series.Font = new Font("Segoe UI", 8.0f, FontStyle.Bold);
 series.ChartType = SeriesChartType.Line;
 series["PieLabelStyle"] = "Outside";

chart.Series.Add(series);

using (MemoryStream ms = new MemoryStream())
 {
 chart.SaveImage(ms, ChartImageFormat.Png);
 ms.Seek(0, SeekOrigin.Begin);
 return File(ms.ToArray(), "image/png", "mycharg.png");
 }
 }

Instead of an ActionResult for the controller, I’m using a FileContentResult. You can also pass in an id which you can use to query your respository (database) for values to use as data points. In my example, I’m just hard coding the values.

Conclusion

It’s been a really long and frustrating day for me but I’m glad I managed to fix my problem which had nothing to do with the problems other people have faced. Hopefully this post is going to help someone and save their time!

The latest version of the MVC framework comes with ASP.NET Web API support and that’s great. But if like me, you’ve got a web forms website where you want to leverage the capabilities of the Microsoft Web Api, then there are some manual things you need to do.

The first question you need to ask yourself is why do you want the Web Api kit in the first place. For me, my main website runs on web form and it’s too much work at the moment to migrate it to MVC. Other new projects are being done in MVC and I need to way to communicate with the new website. For example, I’ve got a central database which stores user details and I need to get information on a particular user by querying the main website through a web service.  You could very well get the same information by querying the database directly but what if you had business logic as well which filters data before it is displayed? For my problem, I needed to get the total points of a particular user by sending off the UserId.

If you right click on your ASP.NET website in Solution Explorer (Visual Studio) and click on “Add New Item”, you can select the “Web API Controller Class” which I’ve renamed as UserController:

I didn’t need all those things in the controller, so I removed all and now it looks like this:

public class UserController : ApiController
{
 // GET api/<controller>/5
 public int Get(int id)
 {
 ISession session = NHibernateSessionManager.CreateSession();
 User user = new Repository<User>(session).GetById(id);
 NHibernateSessionManager.CloseSession(session);

return user.Points;
 }
}

But before you could actually compile your site, you need to add the following codes to your Global.ascx file:

void Application_Start(object sender, EventArgs e)
 {
 RouteTable.Routes.MapHttpRoute(
 name: "DefaultApi",
 routeTemplate: "api/{controller}/{id}",
 defaults: new { id = System.Web.Http.RouteParameter.Optional }
 );
 }

This means that if your website is http://www.mydomain.com, you will be able to access your web api at http://www.mydomain.com/api and in my case for my controller it would be:

http://www.mydomain.com/api/user/5 where 5 is the UserId of the user I want to retrieve the points for.

It was as simple as this and I couldn’t believe it.

How to call the Web API url in code

In order to consume the web api, you can use the HttpClient class. For example in my MVC project, I added the following method:

int _points;

public void GetUserPoints(int userId)
 {
 try
 {
 HttpClient client = new HttpClient();
 client.BaseAddress = new Uri(System.Configuration.ConfigurationManager.AppSettings["ApiUrl"]);

client.DefaultRequestHeaders.Accept.Add(new MediaTypeWithQualityHeaderValue("application/json"));

HttpResponseMessage response = client.GetAsync(String.Concat("user/", userId)).Result; // Blocking call!
 if (response.IsSuccessStatusCode)
 {
 // Parse the response body. Blocking!
 _points = response.Content.ReadAsAsync<int>().Result;
 }
 }
 catch (Exception ex)
 {
 _points = 50;
 }
 }

You’ll need the following namespaces for it to work:

• using System.Net.Http;
• using System.Net.Http.Headers;

Problem getting the Web Api to work on the live server

After everything was tested, I uploaded the new asp.net website which contained my web api interface onto my Windows 2008 box and I was horrified when it threw an error. It was something to do with a missing dll. It happened because the DLL was not found in the GAC while on my local machine that was the case. There are many ways to solve the problem but for me the easier thing was to install the MVC 4 framework on the Windows server to rectify the problem. And that worked!

On one of my website, I was using a special font, the Web Open Font Format (.woff) and while all was working fine in all browsers, I noticed Google Chrome was returning a 404 HTTP Status Code. This meant that it was not able to find the file. I looked into the path given by the style sheet and there it was. So no problem there but what was actually causing the error?

It was my server not knowing what to do with this extension. I was running IIS7.5 and it was not configured to process .woff files. Therefore you either need to add this MIME type to your server by specifying application/x-font-woff to be used for that extension.

Or you can just insert the following lines in your web.config file:

<system.webServer>
 <staticContent>
  <mimeMap fileExtension=".woff" mimeType="application/x-font-woff" />
 </staticContent>
</system.webServer>

I opted for the second option (web.config modification) and Chrome stopped complaining about the missing .woff files.

I used to be highly involved in optimising Adsense on my sites but when Google Panda struck, that was the last thing on my mind. Before I was getting an increasing amount of visitors every month and there was a steady income coming in but since April 2011, things have changed. I’m not going into the details of this  but a week ago, I decided I must find out what webpages were earning me the most on my sites.

My Adsense account has always been linked to my Analytics account since that functionality was made available but for some reason, only my main domain was being reported in. I double checked my settings in both Adsense & Analytics and they were correct. So I was confused. The report showed only partial earnings and when I investigated, I found statistics for one sub domain was missing.

It was then that I realised the problem was due to a modification I made to my GA code when I wanted to track multiple sub domains with the same code. This is the extra line I had:

_gaq.push([‘_setDomainName’, ‘mydomain.com’]);

To rectify the problem, I had to add the following line to my adsense code:

google_analytics_domain_name=”mydomain.com”;

Therefore your adsense block will look like this:

<script type="text/javascript"><!--
google_analytics_domain_name="mydomain.com";
google_ad_client = "ca-pub-123456789";
/* Custom Adsense Unit */
google_ad_slot = "1000000";
google_ad_width = 336;
google_ad_height = 280;
//-->
</script>
<script type="text/javascript"
src="http://pagead2.googlesyndication.com/pagead/show_ads.js">
</script>

Analytics is now displaying the proper stats for Adsense and I can now see which URLs are bringing in the more clicks and how much the clicks are worth. This will help me optimise these webpages fully and also give me the right insights to monetise other pages of my site.

Note that the Adsense programme does not allow you to modify the ad codes. Therefore you might need to have a separate javascript call as follows:

<script type=”text/javascript”>
google_analytics_domain_name=”mydomain.com”;
</script>