Recent Web Log Entries By Ben Nadel
Using IIS URL Rewriting And Application.cfc's OnMissingTemplate() Event Handler
Posted: September 8, 2009 at 9:37 AM by Ben Nadel
When I first starting looking into IIS URL rewriting using IIS Mod-Rewrite , I stated that I didn't want to start distributing the business logic of my application too widely. As such, all my URL rewriting configuration file did was reroute missing-file requests to my ColdFusion application's front-controller. This way, all of the URL mapping was... read more »
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RewriteCond Directives Evaluated After RewriteRule Directives In URL Rewriting
Posted: September 4, 2009 at 11:19 AM by Ben Nadel
This is a minor point, but an important one regarding the control flow of directives within IIS Mod-Rewrite's URL rewriting configuration files. When I first looked at the RewriteCond (rewrite condition) and RewriteRule (rewrite rule) directives , I thought of them like programmatic IF-Statements such that the RewriteCond directives would be eval... read more »
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Understanding The IIS Mod-Rewrite Server Variables
Posted: September 3, 2009 at 8:26 PM by Ben Nadel
When writing RewriteCond (rewrite condition) and RewriteRule (rewrite rule) directives in IIS Mod-Rewrite's URL rewriting configuration files, we have access to several server variables. We can get the value of these server variables using the following syntax: %{VARIABLE_NAME} So, for example, to get the name of the requested file name, we wo... read more »
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Understanding The IIS Mod-Rewrite Log File And Work Flow
Posted: September 3, 2009 at 2:33 PM by Ben Nadel
As I have just started experimenting with URL rewriting in ColdFusion using IIS Mod-Rewrite , I have a lot of learning to do. While some of my experiments are working, I am getting some very unexpected (and frustrating) results which clearly indicate that I need to get a stronger hold on the work flow executing behind each URL rewrite. To gather ... read more »
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Exploring IIS Mod-Rewrite For Rewriting URLs In A ColdFusion Application
Posted: September 1, 2009 at 2:59 PM by Ben Nadel
I've always liked the concept of URL rewriting; but, I've never actually known very much about it. To date, all of the URL "rewriting" that I've done has always been built on top of IIS's 404 error URLs or ColdFusion's OnMissingTemplate() event handler . This has worked, but has always been a hacky solution. Using 404 error handling is easy, bu... read more »
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Creating A "Down For Maintenance" Page Using Application.cfc
Posted: January 9, 2008 at 9:07 AM by Ben Nadel
As some of you may or may not noticed, my site was down earlier for maintenance (more on that later). None of the ColdFusion pages on my site were available, no matter what URLs you used. Creating a page like this is insanely easy when you are using ColdFusion's Application.cfc component. If you have ever examined the application event methods ava... read more »
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ColdFusion 404 Handling Makes Sub Domain Redirects Hard
Posted: September 19, 2007 at 1:07 PM by Ben Nadel
My site runs on the handling of 404 Page Not Found IIS errors within ColdFusion . It is through this mechanism that I am able to translate things like: www.bennadel.com/foo/bar.htm ... into: www.bennadel.com/index.cfm?dax=foo.bar This has been really cool for search engine optimization, but has certainly added some complexity to the page load... read more »
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Exploring Path Info And How It Interacts With ColdFusion And The Browser
Posted: July 18, 2007 at 4:11 PM by Ben Nadel
Earlier today, I blogged about using addition URL path information to solve the Save-As problem that crops up when streaming files using ColdFusion and CFContent. IIS puts this extra URL path information into the CGI variable, path_info. Before today, I had never used this, so I thought it would be good to do a little exploration to see how diff... read more »
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Why Do I Even Get Any Huge Ass Traffic?
Posted: June 26, 2007 at 8:42 AM by Ben Nadel
There was a post yesterday on Full As A Goog (sorry I cannot remember the URL - the Full As A Goog "Search" functionality seems to search the visible page only) with a video that had information about internet porn. It stated that there were literally hundred of millions of porn sites current on the internet. That's a lot of porn. Recently, I ... read more »
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Ask Ben: Truncating The Event Titles In A Calendar Display
Posted: May 7, 2007 at 3:29 PM by Ben Nadel
Say you need to display items on the calendar by text description. You need to show the "title" of the event(s) in an abbreviated form. For example: Long Event Title Goes Here Ben Nadel Might need to be abbreviated as Long Event Title. . . How would you repeatedly determine where to truncate an event title for a calendar? For something like th... read more »
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Skin Spider : Page Data Component
Posted: November 5, 2006 at 11:38 AM by Ben Nadel
To learn all about Skin Spider, click here . To view the most updated application, click here . To view the current code base, click here . Until now, the only thing we set programmatically about the page was a variable called REQUEST.Page. We used this value to determine which primary navigational element was turned on. This was nice and si... read more »
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Ooops, Links Not Working
Posted: June 21, 2006 at 6:31 PM by Ben Nadel
I just realized that one line of code I put into my 404 page-not-found handler (for search engine optimization SEO) was breaking my links. Yikes! I guess that should teach me to more thoroughly test my code once it goes life. ... read more »
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Search Engine Optimization... Another Go Round
Posted: June 19, 2006 at 8:51 AM by Ben Nadel
After talking to Michael Dinowitz at last week's NYCFUG meeting, I have moved my site over to use more search engine optimized links. Instead of going to directories, such as "blog/", all my site links go to "actual" pages, such as "blog/blog-entries.htm". All the pages go to ".htm" files so that the ColdFusion error handler doesn't get called... read more »
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What Search Engine Spiders See
Posted: June 15, 2006 at 9:57 AM by Ben Nadel
I was just posting a Search Engine Optimization question on the House of Fusion CF-Talk list when Nick Tong posted a link to " What Search Engine Spiders See ". This page blows my mind. It allows you to enter in a url and get a report back regarding the page content based on how the search engine web spiders/crawlers see your content. It is fant... read more »
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Search Engine Optimization... Continued
Posted: June 14, 2006 at 9:37 AM by Ben Nadel
In attempt to try an optimize my search engine indexability, I have added a "Complete Web Log Entry List" link as the first item on my homepage content. This way, there will be a page that will have every web log entry's detail page listed for indexing. One of the problems that I have found with search engines is that they will index my "recent"... read more »
