[thelist] query string manipulation

Steven Gongage sgon at osceola.org
Fri Sep 7 14:39:47 CDT 2001


Thanks guys!  My first post here and I got the information I needed!  Much appreciated.

404!!!  Why didn't I think of that... need to play with it to make sure I'm thinking what your saying, but I know where to go now at least.  I'll do some testing for overhead as well, but I'm thinking its probably negligible, right?

If anyone knows of any documentation on this subject that's out there, I'd be interested as well.  

Thanks again!

SteveG

>>> jeff at members.evolt.org 09/07/01 12:04PM >>>
steve,

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> From: Steven Gongage
>
> I'm building a site from the ground up in Coldfusion 5
> on a 2k server running IIS 5.  [...] I came across an
> article about how to "hide" query strings by replacing
> all "&" and "=" with "/", in other words making the
> entire URL look like a long path.
>
> Example:
> http://blah.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=qs&pageaction=add&var1=123 
> http://blah.com/index.cfm/fuseaction/qs/pageaction/add/var1/123 
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

sorry to say, but that's old news.  hidden query strings should, at the very
least, look like this:

http://blah.com/fuseaction/qs/pageaction/add/var1/123 

or, at their very best, look like this:

http://blah.com/qs/add/123 

notice in both examples there isn't a leading index.cfm right after the
domain name.  that's crucial for some search engines as they've gotten wise
to developers mucking about with the url and replacing the ?, =, and & with
slashes.

the last time this thread took place there were skeptics, but we've been
doing it long enough here at work to know it makes a difference.

here's a couple of sites we've built that use this technique.

http://mtbachelor.com/ 
http://hystersales.com/ 
http://bobcatwest.com/ 
http://ditchwitchnw.com/ 
http://24-7magazine.com/ 

i'm not going to give away all of our secrets on how this is accomplished on
iis5, but i will give one big hint that should get you headed in the right
direction -- 404.

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> But in IIS I don't see any way of keeping it from
> resolving the URL and going to the full path other
> than defining all those "directories" and redirecting
> them individualy.  I'm going to have WAY too many
> directories to keep that strait.
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

actually, iis shouldn't care about the appended urls.  instead, it should
try to load up the index.cfm in the root of your site.

><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><
> Has anyone tried this on IIS 5?  Is it even possible?
><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><><

yes, all the sites above are running on iis5.  so, it's definitely possible.
just to prove my point, here's a couple of sites running off a templated
system we built that use the query strings like you're talking about.  these
are all running on a server running iis5.

http://www.capitaldancesport.com/ 
http://www.hawaiistarball.com/ 
http://www.emeraldball.com/ 
http://www.kingsball.com/ 
http://www.usdsc.com/ 

good luck,

.jeff

http://evolt.org/ 
jeff at members.evolt.org 
http://members.evolt.org/jeff/ 



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