Anguish of despair - it doesn't work at...

[Opritschnik]

Hello Hans,

I have just been trying to bring HouseSpider to work on my Internet site for hours. It definitely doesn't want to cooperate.

I work with Win 7 SP1 (x64), IE 8 and Java 6 (24).

The site: http://www.demeure.biz (sorry, it's in French).
Search page where HouseSpider is built in: http://www.demeure.biz/rubriques/recherche.aspx
Directory where the jar files are: http://www.demeure.biz/rubriques/, same as search page

I've tried with various parameters, i.e.:
<param name="URLStart" value="http://housespider.sourceforge.net/index.html">
<param name="URLStart" value="http://www.demeure.biz">
<param name="URLStart" value="http://www.demeure.biz/index.htm"> (home page)
<param name="URLStart" value="../index.htm"> (relative address of home page)
<param name="URLStart" value="default.html> (existing page in "rubriques" directory, with links to various pages)

I tried with the search page and jar files in the root directory. I tried with "Index" and "Noindex" parameters, and various others.

And I tried, and I tried, and I tried!

The result of HouseSpider is always the same: "Status: Done, 0 matches found, 0 pages searched".

How is it possible? It's a pain!

Thanks a lot for helping!

[Hans Fr. Nordhaug]

It's because you have coded your website wrong. If I visit a page that doesn't exist - say http://www.demeure.biz/rubriques/xyz.aspx I get redirect to http://www.demeure.biz/cerbere/404.aspx which returns a 200 code. In other words, you are saying the non-existing page xyz.apsx actually exists after all.

This causes a problem when HouseSpider checks if there is a pre-generated index file. Haven't you noticed the status line saying: "Status: <!DOCTYPE …." HouseSpider reads your 404.aspx and thinks it's the index (since you returned a 200 code). So either you generate an index file (this documented) or you fix your "not found" handling.