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.
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