Today I have committed several major changes to existing Frontfree Website System 2.0. This is a “major” change because it is the first time we have utilized Apache’s rewrite technology on reverse proxying, which, in other words, is an important change that the reverse proxying technology is going much more mature than it was first taken place.

To a person outside Frontfree website, it is easy to pick up a URL like http://www.frontfree.net/view/allarticles.html», which was previously «<FLOATING LINK: http://www.frontfree.net/articles/services/listall.asp>.

This will greatly improve Google and similiar bot acquiration of the Frontfree Website. Finally, this will result in a big progress in PageRank(tm) and more importantly, make it possible to search Frontfree articles through Google, which is weakly supported in the past.

Thanks goes to Che Dong (chedong at chedong dot com) who helped me to make FreeBSDChina.org this style. I have consulted Apache’s manual and finally it result in the following rewrite rule:

RewriteEngine On
RewriteRule /view/article_([0123456789]+)\.html$ http://iissrv.frontfree.net:8100/articles/services/view.asp?id=$1&page=1 [P,L]
RewriteRule /view/article_([0123456789]+)_page([0123456789]+)\.html$ http://iissrv.frontfree.net:8100/articles/services/view.asp?id=$1&page=$2 [P,L]
RewriteRule /view/allarticles\.html$ http://iissrv.frontfree.net:8100/articles/services/listall.asp [P,L]
RewriteRule /view/news_(.+)\.html$ http://iissrv.frontfree.net:8100/news/services/view.asp?id=$1 [P,L]

I like playing with regular expressions, but Apache’s implementation is somewhat too simple and I had to write it complexly.

Of course this will not help the website to have a better performance under load, but it will help to attract more visitors.