Domain name aliases cause problems for nowjs file caching

[Richard Rodger]

Hi Guys,

I've come across a problem where the site I am using nowjs on can be
reach from www.example.com and example.com

Depending on which domain alias is used randomly by clients after a
restart, nowjs "fixes" on the domain alias in fileServer.js, and
requests to the other domain don't work - because the cached files are
returned and fall afoul of the cross-domain restriction.

My fix was to redirect all clients to a canonical domain - is this the
right approach?

thanks,
Richard

[Tom]

The following is slightly related, but not an answer to your question.

From a SEO point of view you would gain from 303ing all requests from the www subdomain to the root or the other way around. www is considered to be a subdomain and if you adhere to both you may be penalized as people will link to the same pages in different ways.

For example, twitter redirects all requests to http://www.twitter.com to http://twitter.com (but this could also be done the other way around.

Tom

2011/6/5 Richard Rodger <ric...@chartaca.com>

[Eric Zhang]

So according to Tom it seems that redirecting clients to a canonical domain is the solution because it benefits you SEO wise.

One note is the cached files in your case should still work as cross-domain and port requests are fully supported with WebSockets, and jsonp-polling. If you use the insecure version of the flashsockets swf then you can get flashsockets to also work crossdomain/port. 

Of course that is not optimal when you can have things not be cross-domain but it shouldn't be not working at all. (Detecting whether the connection should be cross-domain or not is determined at runtime so it's not a problem that cached files are originally set when not-cross-domain but then used in cross-domain context)

Wow ok that was a mouthful. Good luck!

Eric

[Tom]

On another side note Facebook seems to redirect all requests to http://facebook.com to http://www.facebook.com -- so if you're going this road, it comes down to a matter of preference on whether you keep www or not. One argument to keep it would be that many users believe that the www prefix is mandatory in accessing a site, so that they might feel more comfortable by actually seeing this 'www' back in the address bar.

Admittedly this does not have much to do with solving your problem. Sorry I cannot help you further.

Tom

2011/6/5 Eric Zhang <er...@nowjs.com>

[Sridatta Thatipamala]

Hmm, I don't know why NowJS would fix on a particular domain. File
caching/hosting for multiple domains was enabled in this pull request.
https://github.com/Flotype/now/pull/85

It should serve the appropriate version of the file based on what
domain the client appears to be using.

[Eric Zhang]

Hmm I wonder if request.headers.host ignores the subdomain (www.)? That would explain it but otherwise I'm surprised too. (I forgot about that commit before Sri mentioned it)

Eric