Seb Duggan

I’ve been using ISAPI_Rewrite 3 for some time now to rewrite URLs on my IIS server, and generally to create SEO-friendly URLs.

One thing I only discovered today (and am blogging here mainly for my own future reference) is that for every request, the rewrite engine creates a server variable, HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL, which contains the original requested URL. It was useful for me today, as I was writing a missing page handler, but I can think of many other occasions I’ve had to create complicated workarounds to work out what the requested URL was.

Which brings me to a slight oddity. I’m sure I’d have discovered this incredibly useful feature earlier, if it had shown up when I do a dump of the CGI scope. But for some reason, it doesn’t.

I’ve tried doing a cfdump of the CGI scope; and I’ve tried looping over the scope as a collection; but in neither case does the header get returned.

Yet if I make an explicit reference to CGI.HTTP_X_REWRITE_URL – as if by magic, the URL appears…

I’m sure there’s a perfectly reasonable explanation for this – but I wonder how many other similar variables ColdFusion is choosing not to show us?

I've created another plugin for Mango - this time to integrate Woopra tracking and analytics.

Woopra's currently in beta, but I've been using it for some months now and it looks great; and with an API due to be opened up soon, there are lots of groovy features to come...

Read more »

Another plugin for Mango Blog...

If you've got ColdFusion 8, you might like to use its built-in CAPTCHA generation instead of using LylaCaptcha (Mango's default). You can see it in action on this blog.

Read more »

As mentioned earlier, this site is powered by Mango Blog. Having played with it a little to get it installed, I thought I'd look at its extensibility...

The plugin framework seems quite simple once the basic concepts have been understood; so I started to write my first plugin.

Read more »

I was recently building a new page for a client who required a CAPTCHA to prevent spamming. Great, I thought: I can use ColdFusion 8's <cfimage> tag; which I did, and it was really simple to do.

Shortly after the page went live, I started getting complaints that a lot of the time, the CAPTCHAs were dark, murky, and often unreadable. I couldn't work out why: I'd done some test pages with <cfimage>, and they always looked perfect...

Read more »