I am using an IP location lookup to display localised prices to customers depending on whether they are visiting from the UK, US or general EU and defaulting to the US price if the location can't be determined.
I could easily force the system to believe I'm from a specific country for testing but still there is no way of knowing for sure that it's displaying correctly when a visitor from abroad accesses my site. Is the use of some proxy the only viable way of testing a site like this? If so how would I go about tracking down one that I can use to test my site from various countries of origin?
You should be able to achieve that by using proxies. http://www.proxy4free.com/page1.html has a bunch. That site just came from a Google search; I've never used proxies like this before though, so there may be better sites out there.
This is not about how to test, but rather how you identify your visitors.
Instead of using IP-lookup to determine their geographical location, you should instead grab the information about the locale they use from the useragent string.
F.instance, I'm a norwegian, and when I go to useragent.org I see that my browser sends "nb-NO" as the language my machine uses.
You can easily use that to customize currency, dates etc on your site.
If the website is indexed in Google's cache, you can visit the google with the proper URL address. ex. http://www.google.co.uk/
And see if it's displaying properly in the cache.
#Frode:
Checking system locale in iseragent string might be misleading.
I go to Canada, and set my system locale as French. So it might show the user EU prices as opposed to showing US price. Many such cases are possible where locale wont give accurate info about the end users desired "price class" in this particular application mentioned.
=AD
If you want to use geo-ip location to detect a user's language, using a proxy probably is the best way to do so.
There are a lot of lists of open proxies on the web, mostly listed with the countries. Google has quite a lot of search results on this topic. Of the top results, I have used SamAir to test some stuff before.
Searching for a working open proxy with an acceptable speed in the correct country can be a tedious task. Also keep in mind that you should not use any these proxy servers to submit any sensitive data, because you never know who runs them. This could be a kinda trustworthy ISP (ie. not from GB ;D), a honeypot to collect data, or an illegal open proxy hosted by some trojan.
Related
I have 30 separate external urls, each with a different landing page variation, and I want to serve one up at random on a click.
Ideally, repeat clicks would be guaranteed a different url than they were served already, but not a strict requirement, this would be great though if possible.
I've seen examples of people using rewrite/writecond to split test based on the odd/even timestamp of the click, or based on the numbers in their ip address, but this wouldn't really accomplish this task.
I would strongly prefer to do this within the httpd server itself without relying on a python/php script, and I feel like this must be possible, I just haven't been able to find a solution so far.
We have a single-page app (AngularJs) which interacts with the backend using REST API. The app allows each user to see information about the company the user works at, but not any other company's data. Our current REST API looks like this:
domain.com/companies/123
domain.com/companies/123/employees
domain.com/employees/987
NOTE: All ids are GUIDs, hence the last end-point doesn't have company id, just the employee id.
We recently started working on enforcing the requirement of each user having access to information related exclusively the company where the user works. This means that on the backend we need to track who the logged in user is (which is simple auth problem) as well as determining the company whose information is being accessed. The latter is not easy to determine from our REST API calls, because some of them do not include company id, such as the last one shown above.
We decided that instead of tracking company ID in the UI and sending it with each request, we would put it in the subdomain. So, assuming that ACME company has id=123 our API would change as follows:
acme.domain.com
acme.domain.com/employees
acme.domain.com/employees/987
This makes identifying the company very easy on the backend and requires minor changes to REST calls from our single-page app. However, my concern is that it breaks the RESTfulness of our API. This may also introduce some CORS problems, but I don't have a use case for it now.
I would like to hear your thoughts on this and how you dealt with this problem in the past.
Thanks!
In a similar application, we did put the 'company id' into the path (every company-specific path), not as a subdomain.
I wouldn't care a jot about whether some terminology enthusiast thought my design was "RESTful
" or not, but I can see several disadvantages to using domains, mostly stemming from the fact that the world tends to assume that the domain identifies "the server", and the path is how you find an item on that server. There will be a certain amount of extra stuff you'll have to deal with with multiple domains which you wouldn't with paths:
HTTPS - you'd need a wildcard certificate instead of a simple one
DNS - you're either going to have wildcard DNS entries, or your application management is now going to involve DNS management
All the CORS stuff which you mention - may or may not be a headache in your specific application - anything which is making 'same domain' assumptions about security policy is going to be affected.
Of course, if you want lots of isolation between companies, and effectively you would be as happy running a separate server for each company, then it's not a bad design. I can't see it's more or less RESTful, as that's just a matter of viewpoint.
There is nothing "unrestful" in using subdomains. URIs in REST are opaque, meaning that you don't really care about what the URI is, but only about the fact that every single resource in the system can be identified and referenced independently.
Also, in a RESTful application, you never compose URLs manually, but you traverse the hypermedia links you find at the API endpoint and in all the returned responses. Since you don't need to manually compose URIs, from the REST point of view it's indifferent how they look. Having a URI such as
//domain.com/ABGHTYT12345H
would be as RESTful as
//domain.com/companies/acme/employees/123
or
//domain.com/acme/employees/smith-charles
or
//acme.domain.com/employees/123
All of those are equally RESTful.
But... I like to think of usable APIs, and when it comes to usability having readable meaningful URLs is a must for me. Also following conventions is a good idea. In your particular case, there is nothing unrestful with the route, but it is unusual to find that kind of behaviour in an API, so it might not be the best practice. Also, as someone pointed out, it might complicate your development (Not specifically on the CORS part though, that one is easily solved by sending a few HTTP headers)
So, even if I can't see anything non REST on your proposal, the conventions elsewhere would be against subdomains on an API.
So, we're trying to up our application in the rankings in the search engines, and one way our SEO guy told us to do that was to register similar domains...for example we have something like
http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html
so..we acquired the domain parks.com (again just an example).
Now when people go to http://www.parks.com ...we want it to display the content of http://www.myapplication.com/parks.html.
I could just put a forwarding page there, but from what i've been told that makes us look bad because it's technically a permanent redirect..and we're trying to get higher in the search engine rankings, not lower.
Is this a situation where we would use the Server.Transfer method of ASP.net?
How are situations like this handled, because I've defiantly seen this done by many websites.
We also don't want to cheat the system, we are showing relevant content and not spam or tricking customers in anyway, so the proper way to do achieve what i'm looking for would be great.
Thanks
Use your "similar" domain names to host individual and targetted landing pages that will point to your master content.
It's easier to manage and you will get a higher conversion rate.
Having to create individual page will force you to write relevent content and will increase the popularity of the page.
I also suggest you to not only build landing pages, but mini sites (of few pages).
SEO is sa very high demanding task.
Regarding technical aspects: Server.Transfer is what you should use. Never use Response.Redirect, Google and other search engines will drop your ranking.
I used permanent URL rewrite in the past. I changed my website and since lots of traffic was coming from others website linking mine, I wanted to have a permanent solution.
Read more about URL rewriting : http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/ms972974.aspx
I'm a new REST convert and I'm trying to design my first RESTful (hopefully) api and here is my question about addressing resources
Some notes first:
The data described here are 3d render
jobs
A user (graphics company) has multiple projects.
A project has multiple render jobs.
A render job has multiple frames.
There is a hierarchy enforced in the data (1 render job
belongs to one project, to one user)
How's this for naming my resourses...?
https:/api.myrenderjobsite.com/
/users/graphicscompany/projects
/users/graphicscompany/projects/112233
/users/graphicscompany/projects/112233/renders/
/users/graphicscompany/projects/112233/renders/889900
/users/graphicscompany/projects/112233/renders/889900/frames/0004
OR a shortened address for renders?
/users/graphicscompany/renders/889900
/users/graphicscompany/renders/889900/frames/0004
OR should I shorten (even more) the address if possible, omitting the user when not needed...?
/projects/112233/
/renders/889900/
/renders/889900/frames/0004
THANK YOU!
Instead of thinking about your api in terms of URLs, try thinking of it more like pages and links
between those pages.
Consider the following:
Will it be reasonable to create a resource for users? Do you have 10, 20 or 50 users? Or do you have 10,000 users? If it is the latter then obviously creating a single resource that represents all users is probably not going too work to well when you do a GET on it.
Is the list of Users a reasonable root url? i.e. The entry point into your service. Should the list of projects that belong to a GraphicsCompany be a separate resource, or should it just be embedded into the Graphics Company resource? You can ask the same question of each of the 1-to-many relationships that exist. Even if you do decide to merge the list of projects into the GraphicsCompany resource, you may still want a distinct resource to exist simple for the purpose of being able to POST to it in order to create a new project for that company.
Using this approach you should be able get a good idea of most of the resources in your API and how they are connected without having to worry about what your URLs look like. In fact if you do the design right, then any client application you right will not need to know anything about the URLs that you create. The only part of the system that cares what the URL looks like is your server, so that it can dispatch the request to the right controller.
The other significant question you need to ask yourself is what media type are you going to use for these resources. How many different clients will need to access these resources? Are you writing the clients, or is someone else? Should you attempt to reuse an existing standard like XHTML and classes/microformats? Could you squeeze most of the information into Atom? Maybe Atom with some extra namespaces like GDATA does it? Or is this only going to be used internally so you can just create your own media types, like application/vnd.YourCompany.Project+xml, application/vnd.YourCompany.Render+xml, etc.
There are many things to think about when designing a REST api, don't get hung up on what your URLs look like and you should really try to avoid doing "design by URL".
Presuming that you authenticate to the service, I would use the 1st option, but remove the user, particularly if the user is the currently logged in user.
If user actually represents something else (like client), I would include it, but not if it simply designates the currently logged in user. Agree with StaxMan, though, don't worry too much about squeezing the paths, as readability is key in RESTful APIs.
Personally I would not try to squeeze path too much, that is, some amount of redundant information is helpful both to quickly see what resource is, and for future expansion.
Generally users won't be typing paths anyway, so verbosity is not all that bad.
We basically have 2 sites ( Java /JSP / Apache Webserver) :
something.ca & something.com
The .ca is canadian content, and the .com is american content.
We need users to be redirected based on the ip addreess.
We want US users to get the .com site and Canadian users get the .ca site.
What is the best way to do this (at a webserver level or otherwise ) ?
Please elaborate.
In my web surfing experience, most websites - UPS.com for example - ask the user to select their country site rather than trying to figure it out themselves. They remember the selection in a cookie. Much depends on how voluntary your use case requires this redirection to be.
On the implementation side, I'd use a filter that would check the setting and fire a redirect if need be.
I've used GeoIP from Maxmind and it works well. They have a free version GeoCountry Lite That's 99.3% accurate. the Java API is here I would follow google's practice of having a link back to the original version if you do the redirect.
Check out GeoDirection. It may handle what you want through javascript.
http://www.geobytes.com/GeoDirection.htm
Another option would be to grab the culture from the browser environment settings and map those cultures to countries in your application. Depending on what you are actually trying to do this may not work for you as this will not give you the user's physical location, but will get you their preferred culture. So if a Canadian travels to the US they will still get the Canadian site unless they changed their browser settings for some reason.
There are a lot of IP geolocation APIs out there - I don't know if there's anything good out there that you don't have to pay for:
Using culture settings is an option, but doesn't work in some cases. What if you have a German user in the US who likes his dates etc. displayed in the format he's comfortable with? Doesn't change the fact that he's in the US.
I think that's one of the reasons why most companies simply ask the user and then store that information in a cookie (UPS, FedEx and most major airlines do that). Check out www.lufthansa.com. They actually ask for location and language(to account for countries with more than one official language like Switzerland).