How to use friendly url’s, performance costs, and if it’s worth 2

[Entrep]

Hi,
I am building a web app (a web community) in which about 1000 users will have its own website (standard but customized), and I want that website has a friendly url like

http://www.mycommunity.com/petersmith

With this url in the address bar, I want to show the initial customized web page (called for example: initial_page.aspx) but without showing that page name and extension file, so, only

http://www.mycommunity.com/petersmith

. I am thinking to use that name of the user at the end of my web address (petersmith) to search in my database which user number is that name, and display the customized data and design accordingly.

After that, once the visitor has logged in that initial page, I want to show the main page of that user’s website, and I think it would be nice to continue displaying in the url the name of the user (

http://www.mycommunity.com/petersmith/main_page.aspx).

What do you think about this? It has important costs? The user will appreciate this detail of personalization of his website? I think the website

http://www.myspace.com

does a similar thing with their users, but I ignore if they do it for the same purpose (to take care of user personalization) or only for SEO (Search Engine Optimization)

I would like to know as well your expert opinion about which technique would be the best to make it work efficiently this idea, with minimum performance penalty

Thank you

 

[ca8msm]

What ASP.NET engine are you using? Webforms or MVC?

I'll assume webforms for now ince it is posted in this forum, in which case have a read up on URL Rewriting.

Mark,

Darlington Web Design[tab]|[tab]Experts, Information, Ideas & Knowledge[tab]|[tab]ASP.NET Tips & Tricks

 

[Entrep]

Thanks Mark,

I tried to install urlrewriternet component (

http://urlrewriter.net/)

but I get an error in web.config file in “<configSections>” tag:

Attribute 'requirePermission' not recognized


The configuration seems very easy.. (

http://urlrewriter.net/index.php/support/configuration)

I use Windows 2000 server, IIS 5.0, and .Net Framework 1.1.4322.

Perhaps the problem is that I don’t use Visual Studio, because I program inline. So, instead of add a reference of that component to my application, I have copied the .dll file (Intelligencia.UrlRewriter.dll) to my bin folder, and I haven’t done any compilation as the configuration instructions said. Anyway I don’t know how to do such a compilation..

 

[jmeckley]

VS is just a pretty UI on top of all the tools used by the .net framework sdk. you can use the command line tools to compile the code. csc.exe, vbc.exe, etc. depending on the language you are using.

why would you be using .net 1.1? at least use .net 2.0 the improvements to the framework from 1.x to 2 are huge. it's also much easier to upgrade from 2.0 to 3, 3.5, 4.

Jason Meckley
Programmer

faq855-7190
faq732-7259

 

[Entrep]

I have compiled some vb files in the past from the command line, and worked fine.
But with the files downloaded of this component (

http://urlrewriter.net/index.php/download),

I can’t see any vb or c# file to compile. Even with Visual Studio, which are the files to compile?

 

[ca8msm]

I haven't used that particular rewriter, but their documentation should hopefully help you.

Mark,

Darlington Web Design[tab]|[tab]Experts, Information, Ideas & Knowledge[tab]|[tab]ASP.NET Tips & Tricks

 

[jmeckley]

you would reference the assemblies, not compile them. they are already compiled. your best resource will be the command line help and msdn on how to use the command line tools.

Jason Meckley
Programmer

faq855-7190
faq732-7259

 

[Entrep]

I upgraded to .Net Framework 2.0 as you said, and now I can use a component that works fine (

http://www.urlrewriting.net/149/en/home.html)

Thank you!