Sitecore tip of the day – Rebuild Lucene Search Index
How do I rebuild a Lucene Search Index in Sitecore?
- Log in to the Sitecore desktop at http://yoursite/sitecore/
- Click the Sitecore button and open the Control Panel
- Click on the Database group
- Click Rebuild the Search Index
- Select the indexes you wish to rebuild and click the Rebuild button
Ed Catmull, Pixar: Keep Your Crises Small
- Organisational structure should not be confused for communication structure
- Success hides problems.
- If you give a good idea to a mediocre group they'll screw it up. If you give a mediocre idea to a good group they'll fix it - or throw it away. (described by Ed as "People and how they function is more important than ideas")
- When a team functions well together, they will succeed
- Make something that's broken better rather than copying a success -> taken literally this could be contrary to Al Ries theory of mining the rich gold vein in his book Focus
- Post mortems should be a critical in depth analysis. Pixar's current post mortem technique is to ask people to give feedback regarding the process they used on that film: 5 things they would do again and 5 things they wouldn't do again
TortoiseSVN icons not working in Windows 7
I have been having a problem where Tortoise SVN icons have not been appearing in Windows 7, and this seemed to fix my problem.
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/1057734/tortoisesvn-icons-not-showing-up-under-windows-7
Parsing and analysing IIS W3C log files
There are three methods I've used to parse and analyse IIS W3C log files in the last couple of weeks. AWStats, Log Parser, and SQL Server.
Option 1: Use AWStats
http://awstats.sourceforge.net/
Free real-time logfile analyzer to get advanced statistics (GNU GPL). This can be used on the command line and produces graphs and stats in webpages. To install and get stats from your first log file will probably take 1-2 hours.
Option 2: Use Log Parser 2.2 from Microsoft
http://www.microsoft.com/downloads/details.aspx?FamilyID=890cd06b-abf8-4c25-91b2-f8d975cf8c07&displaylang=en
"Most software is designed to accomplish a limited number of specific tasks. Log Parser is different... the number of ways it can be used is limited only by the needs and imagination of the user. The world is your database with Log Parser."
Microsoft, I can't believe you really just said that.
Anyway the Log parser is a handy tool, even more so because you can query log files themselves using SQL like syntax. This one only takes about 10 minutes to download and install, and you can be pulling useful numbers out of it within about 5 minutes.
Option 3: Use SQL Server Management Studio
Create a table similar to the following (depending on the format of your log)
CREATE TABLE [dbo].[tablename] (
[date] [datetime] NULL,
[time] [datetime] NULL ,
[c-ip] [varchar] (50) NULL ,
[cs-method] [varchar] (50) NULL ,
[cs-uri-stem] [varchar] (255) NULL ,
[cs-uri-query] [varchar] (2048) NULL ,
[sc-status] [int] NULL ,
[sc-bytes] [int] NULL ,
[time-taken] [int] NULL ,
[cs(User-Agent)] [varchar] (255) NULL ,
[cs(Cookie)] [varchar] (2048) NULL ,
[cs(Referer)] [varchar] (2048) NULL
)
Populate it using this command
BULK INSERT [dbo].[tablename] FROM 'c:\data\my.log'
WITH (
FIELDTERMINATOR = ' ',
ROWTERMINATOR = '\n'
)
(code taken from http://support.microsoft.com/kb/296085)
If you already have SQL Server Management Studio installed this method is useful, especially due to the familiar syntax (SQL)