mca blog

i decided to move the blog to a 'more friendly' URL today. actually, i'd been thinking about this for a while and finally decided to pull the trigger.

my exyus app root (and all the templates that go with that) lives at the /xcs/ root on my server. that makes sense to me and makes it easy for me to run a test environment on my XP workstation without too much hassle (don't get me started on IIS VROOT problems on XP!). however, several things come into play w/ my framework that can make moving things around a bit tricky. first, i use the /xcs/ root for the code base (bin folder) and the templates - fine. but i also use .net (http) handlers set to listen for *.xcs documents. that means requests won't work unless you tack on .xcs (/folder/index.xcs). finally, i want to make sure users don't even *see* .xcs (who the freep cares about some silly file type!). it's involved, but i have a simple weapon - ISAPI_Rewrite.

it works (almost identically) like apache's mod_rewrite. it's just a file full of regexp statements to help sort out requests. and i use it a lot! anyway, my site was living with URLs like:

that's cool and all, but i decided i like this better:

and i didn't have to touch any of the code! i only had to update a single XSLT file (had a variable for the site-root) and then update the httpd.ini used by the rewriter to handle the details. now it's all sweet and clean. as a side benefit, i left support in for the old address. that means any existing links will work fine. soon, i'll change that to a redirection rule to inform other browsers of the change (again, just update the httpd.ini). finally, sometime in the future, i'll proly turn off support for the old addresses completely. all without changing my code!