I spent some time last weekend migrating the Work Avoidance site away from Gradwell and onto a dedicated virtual server from MEMSET. Since this involved a move to a Windows box away from UNIX hosting, I had to configure in IIS7 some of the settings I had in the .htaccess under the UNIX host.
For example, I want a canonical host name (so visitors always see workavoidance.net with no www prefix in the address bar) and to ensure that the WordPress permalinks work properly. While I was at it I took the opportunity to disable hot-linking of our images, since for some reason a Russian website had taken a shine to some of our Armory graphics.
Below is the web.config I created. It redirects users to the canonical host name, enables WordPress permalinks and disables hot-linking of our images. The redirect proved something of a problem to begin with. Our iPhone App “Monkey Shaker” has an online high score system. Scores are submitted from the app via an encrypted HTTP POST to a PHP page which decrypts the information and updates the database. I discovered that when you issue a server side redirect most clients won’t re-POST their data to the new page – they will issue a GET for the new page and the original POST data is lost. This meant that highscore submissions were failing.
(NB: this isn’t as big a disaster as it sounds since we built a very robust mechanism to retry score submission into the app.)
So, you’ll note an extra entry in the web.config to exclude that page from a redirect:
<add input="{URL}" negate="true" pattern="scoresubmit\.php$" /> |
“Why not just change the URL in the app to be canonical?!” You may well ask. Yes, we probably will, but that relies on issuing an update and getting over a quarter of a million users to download it. This way we don’t have to rely on that.
Still to come – how I implemented caching in WordPress and in our high score system to improve performance.
Here’s the rewrite rules section of the completed web.config:
<rule name="Canonical Host Name" stopProcessing="true"> <match url="(.*)" /> <conditions> <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" negate="true" pattern="^workavoidance\.net$" /> <add input="{URL}" negate="true" pattern="scoresubmit\.php$" /> </conditions> <action type="Redirect" url="http://workavoidance.net/{R:1}" redirectType="Permanent" /> </rule> <rule name="Prevent image hotlinking"> <match url=".*\.(gif|jpg|png)$"/> <conditions> <add input="{HTTP_REFERER}" pattern="^$" negate="true" /> <add input="{HTTP_REFERER}" pattern="^http://workavoidance\.net/.*$" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="/no.png" /> </rule> <rule name="wordpress" patternSyntax="Wildcard"> <match url="*" /> <conditions> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsFile" negate="true" /> <add input="{REQUEST_FILENAME}" matchType="IsDirectory" negate="true" /> </conditions> <action type="Rewrite" url="index.php" /> </rule> |