If you add rules using the PB interface you don't need the extra xml for <searchFor>, <replaceWith>, etc. and you don't need CDATA, or comments.

I'll have to check and see if Portal rules work without a license.

can you please tell me what "[^>]" and "[^<]" means?

^ means "NOT", so ^ Followed by > means find a character that is not >.

The square brackets are a character group, and the + after that group means find the group one or more times. So in essence it is telling the engine to capture everything up until the closing >

John, your support for your product is absolutely outstanding. I haven't even bought a license yet and you go to this length to ensure I am happy. Even after I hinted your product was worthless. (I apologize for that by the way. That was extremely arrogant on my part.)

Although I have not quite configured this to where I need it yet, we will be purchasing a license soon as the caching and replacement engine are invaluable in itself (as you said).

Again, thank you so much for your support. I really wish there were words to accurately describe my gratitude. hopefully this gets close.

-Mike

Thanks Mike.

Skin css is still not being merged and is loading before pb.css. Can we address this issue?

You must have something configured to exclude skin.css from the Merge.

You can find out why it is excluded by turning on tracing in the Snapsis.PageBlaster.config file, set level="Debug".

Or you can post your excludePaths section here and I'll try to figure it out.

<excludePaths>
<path pattern="/admin/|/host/|install|jquery\.min|swfobject" excludeFrom="All" />
<path pattern="ctl[/=](edit|module|tab)" excludeFrom="Replacements" />
<path pattern="\.js$|\.css$|\.html$" excludeFrom="Replacements" />
<path pattern="library\.js$" excludeFrom="MergeJS" />
</excludePaths>

That's it. All CSS is merged except skin.css. I set trace to debug and cleared chache and restarted the app and hard refreshed then look at the log after a request and nothing is in there relating to excluding anything. the word exclude doesnt even appear in the log. What should I look for in the log to indicate a resource was excluded from merge?

John, I sent you a PM with the trace information etc...

Searching for "exclude" in the trace should find the reason, and I don't see and reason why it would be excluded form that config.

The trace is buffered, so it may take a little while for it to actually be there.

I've never seen it skip over skin.css unless it is not in the head, or excluded. I guess it could be that it is in a comment. Could you attach the actual source of the page?

Ok, I found the problem. It turns out that the link didn't match because of the space in the href. That isn't something that would show up in a trace.
I'm surprised that issue hasn't been reported before this.

Anyway, I have compiled a new dll and attached it to this post.
Just drop the DLL in your /bin folder and it should work.

awesome thanks. will try out in the am.

John, yep, that did it. Thanks so much again for all your extraordinary help. =o) I am sending you another PM.