I've pretty much finished migrating my personal website from classic ASP to ASP.NET 2.0. In the end I decided to keep certain pages using ASP (Active Server Pages) technology (more on that in a moment), the majority of the pages however have been migrated.

Minimise Page Rank Loss

While I wanted to bring my site up-to-date I also didn't want to lose too much Google Page Rank in the process, and make people's bookmarks and RSS blog subscriptions stop functioning. The reason the pages have to change URLs is that ASP.NET pages use the extension .aspx, compared to ASP's .asp 3-digit extension. So my portfolio.asp page for example has become portfolio.aspx.

Analysing what can be Migrated

My blog area uses Google's Blogger as a CMS, so this area hasn't had to change, although prior to using Blogger I had previously built my own blog engine and this has remained as is.

The most popular part of my site is my Cisco CCNA section. Apart from the new menu page, the other pages have half-decent Page Rank and a few pages also have DMOZ entries, so those have had to remain ASP too.

Using 301 Permanent Redirects

All the other pages however have been migrated. When you now visit those old pages (from SERPS or old links) you'll get HTTP 301 redirected to the new ASP.NET pages. Because I'm on a shared server with no access to IIS (Internet Information Server), I essentially had to hard-code ASP 301 redirects on all the ASP pages that have moved, redirecting users to the new versions.

Update Robots.txt

The next step in the process was to include those old ASP pages in my robots.txt file and log-in to the Google Webmaster console to expedite the removal of those old pages from the Google index using the URL Removal tool. If you haven't already accessed Webmaster tools I highly recommend you log-in and verify your site.

Spidering as a Final Check

Next, I made sure all navigation menus and links to the old pages under my control were pointing to the new versions. This meant updating my Blogger template and republishing, updating my old ASP navigation include files and crawling my site using XENU link sleuth to check for any I had missed.

Conclusion

Moving my content over to ASP.NET has been fairly straight forward due to the small number of pages, my Tools and Portfolio pages display data stored in XML files, so it was just a case of using XmlDataSource controls to pull the information onto the pages. My homepage picks up the latest entries in my Blogger Atom feed using XSLT, and my contact form uses basic ASP.NET form and validation controls.

Increased Functionality

While migrating my content I thought I'd use the caching feature built-in to ASP.NET to allow me to display my latest ma.gnolia bookmarks on my site, so I ended-up creating a Bookmarks page, which fetches my ma.gnolia lite RSS bookmarks XML file, either from ma.gnolia.com or my cache. The cache doesn't hold my data for as long as I stipulate, but I'm assuming this is because I'm on a shared server and the cache is dropping it to free resources.

More and more sites are adopting XML syndication technologies such as RSS and ATOM which users can subscribe to.

Pull Technology

Rather than being a push technology like email newsletters, RSS is a pull technology. The subscriber is in full control of the subscription, the publisher does not have a relationship with the subscriber, or need to know their email address. This makes unsubscribing very easy and because you don't need to supply an email you do not need to worry whether your details will be sold on by unscrupulous companies.

RSS Adoption

XML syndication has been around for over 5 years or so, but in the early days the RSS readers available weren't up to scratch, so it took a while for the technology to gather momentum. Nowadays there are plenty of good readers, such as Bloglines, Google Reader etc, which are very polished products that support all the major formats.

RSS Advertising

The last nail in the email newsletters coffin will be the adoption of RSS advertising into the mainstream. Currently Google and Yahoo! are performing tests with advertising on these syndication formats. As soon as these are released the already strong relationship Google has with publishers will allow it to rapidly make RSS very lucrative for website publishers.

Syndication Analytics

Until recently publishers syndicating their content via RSS had a hard time analysing their circulation, that's where companies such as Feedburner have found a niche and continue to provide publishers with additional services on top of basic subscription tracking.

Syndication SPAM

Of course syndicating your content is just another method of publishing. First you had paper, then HTML now XML. You can't irradiate SPAM with RSS, people can set up SPAM blogs etc, but it's the subscribers who are in control of their subscriptions. So as a publisher you know that your 500 subscribers reported by your RSS analytics product of choice are actively reading your content or else they'd simply click to unsubscribe from within their RSS reader application. Compare that to a database of registered subscribers dating back several years; are those users viewing your newsletter in their preview pane and pressing delete rather than unsubscribing via an unsubscribe link?

Content is King

The old adage that 'content is King' is truer than ever with RSS syndication. The problem with giving such power to the subscriber is that your content needs to be top-notch in order to keep your subscribers subscribing. Even though there are guidelines specifying opt-out and unsubscribe methods and practices, which newsletter senders must adhere to, the fact is unsubscribing from RSS is far easier and is not reliant on differing geographic data protection laws.