How The Guardian successfully moved its domain to theguardian.com

Re:How The Guardian successfully moved its domain to theguar... by napcae on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @09:14AM (#7258176)

>If the host was www.theguardian.com, we would rewrite all the URLs on the site to be www.theguardian.com. If the Host was www.guardian.co.uk we would rewrite all the URLs on the site to be www.guardian.co.uk.

wat?

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How The Guardian successfully moved its domain to theguar... by peroo on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @09:19AM (#7258197)

They couldn't change all URLs to be relative, so instead they wrote a filter which would rewrite absolute URLs to match the selected hostname. A simple fix for a relatively complex problem.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How The Guardian successfully moved its domain to theguar... by VBprogrammer on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @10:59AM (#7258767)

Or a hack which will never be removed from the code-base, depending on your point of view.

I'm intrigued as to why changing to relative domains wasn't possible. If nothing else pushing 'http://www.theguardian.com' out for every link adds to a lot of bytes up for a busy site.

[ Parent | on HN ]

Re:How The Guardian successfully moved its domain to theguar... by cbr on Tuesday February 18, 2014 @11:30AM (#7258995)

    pushing 'http://www.theguardian.com' out for every link
    adds to a lot of bytes up for a busy site

Fewer than you'd think after gzip compression:

    $ curl -s http://www.theguardian.com/us | wc -c
    223195
    $ curl -s http://www.theguardian.com/us | \
       sed s'~http://www.theguardian.com~~' | wc -c
    215473
    $ curl -s http://www.theguardian.com/us | \
       gzip | wc -c
    33783
    $ curl -s http://www.theguardian.com/us | \
       sed s'~http://www.theguardian.com~~' | gzip | wc -c
    33554

They have 7.7k of extra html due to repeating "http://www.theguardian.com" for every link, but gzip compressed this is only a difference of 229 bytes.

[ Parent | on HN ]