While in training this week I spent some time catching up on the kickin public facing SharePoint sites that are out there in production. Of course one that always grabs the eye is Hawaiian Airlines. The funny thing about it was that their site happened to be down when I tried to show it off to the guy next to me in the class. Even better was the excellent display of the exact ASP.NET error dump. It appears that the cause of their troubles that day was their URL Rewriter (at least that is the error that was on the page).
I have yet to hear from anyone what the exact problem was with their use of the rewriter, but I have it on good authority that the one they were using is a good one. Several of the other MS Partners in the training raved about their own use of it on their customer projects.
This is a recommended rewriter that was used by the Hawaii Air site.
Intelligencia.UrlRewriter
It appears Hawaiian Air is no longer using a rewriter, or if they are it isn't doing a very good job of taking care of the "/pages/default.aspx" page names. Maybe having their public site down for a little over a day was just too much pain to worry about URLs and they gave it up.
But, I would like to see if other people out there are running into similar problems with this or other rewriters. Also, it would be good to see any other good rewriter tools that you might have found work well with SharePoint sites.
I love seeing good, polished, public facing SharePoint sites, but they almost always maintain that tell-tale URL format. It would be awesome to have people hit these sites without a clue that it was really SharePoint under the hood.