Tips (contd.)
Tip 7: Rewrite your URLs
Cleaning your URLs has all sorts of benefits -- it can improve the security
of your site, ease migration woes, and provide an extra layer of abstraction
to your Web applications. Moving from a ColdFusion to an ASP based site, for
example, is no big deal if you can remap the URLs. Apache users have long
bragged about the huge power of mod_rewrite -- the standard Apache module for
URL rewriting. Well, there are now literally a dozen versions of this type
of product for IIS -- many of them quite a bit easier to use than mod_rewrite,
which tends to presume familiarity with regular expression arcana. Check out,
for example, IIS ReWrite
or ISAPI ReWrite. So brag no
more, Apache partisans.
Tip 6: Add browser detection
There are a lot of ways to build Web sites, but assuming everybody has a
certain browser or screen size is just plain stupid. Simple JavaScript
sniff-scripts exist for client-side browser detection, but if you are an IIS
user you can do better with a product called
BrowserHawk from CyScape. The
Apache world doesn't really have something comparable to this popular,
mature and well-supported product. Speaking of CyScape, they've recently
added an interesting-looking related product called
CountryHawk
that helps with location detection, but so far I haven't had the
language- or location-sensitive content to warrant trying it out.
Tip 5: Gzip site content
Browsers can handle Gzipped and deflated content and decompress it on the
fly. While IIS 5 had a gzip feature built-in, it is pretty much broken. Enter
products like Pipeboost to give us
better functionality -- similar to what Apache users have enjoyed with
mod_gzip.
Don't waste your bandwidth -- even Google encodes its content, and their
pages are tiny.