Exo-Brain Software Blog

Most of us have an interest in protecting our content from digital thieves, which, sadly, the internet is full of. There are any number of ways a person can steal content from your site; in this article we’ll look into frames. They generally fell out of favor shortly after being introduced, but while they’re used only in a minority of sites, they are still being used.

Google Images is an example, and an edge case. Clicking an image from the search results takes you to a frameset, with Google’s branding along the top of the browser window, and the page the image was found on below. This is permissible use, however; Google Images sends my photography site about 8,500 visitors per month.

There are three main ways to steal and republish visual content, be it an image, video, or other media: Continue Reading »

4 Comments »

“Rewriting” means intercepting a request from the web, and responding with the document behind a different URL. If this sounds like a redirect, it should; the main difference is that we’ll be doing this internally, without the client’s knowledge. ( The “client” is Internet Explorer, FireFox, Safari, or GoogleBot. ) In other words, www.example.com/page.aspx?search=software becomes exposed to the outside world as www.example.com/page/search/software; when somebody asks for the latter, the request is internally sent to the former.

You might do this after restructuring a web site, to prevent links to moved pages from turning into dead ends. Or, you might do it to improve your standing with search engines, the way most WordPress blogs use a post’s date and title, rather than it’s ID in the database, to create “permalinks.” On Apache servers, this is accomplished with mod_rewrite in the .htaccess file, which isn’t available to IIS users.

Instead, developers running Microsoft’s web server, Internet Information Services, or IIS, have three options for rewriting. Let’s examine these, in reverse order by difficulty and cleverness. Continue Reading »

1 Comment »