mod_proxy & magic buttons

[psychevinyl]

apache's mod_proxy is a small apache plug-in that allows url changes,redirects with someways. what makes this small plug-in special at these days is;

when you want your Ajax application to make a XMLHTTPRequest, you will hit the crossdomain restriction. Basically you cant make a XMLHTTPRequest other domains, this is infact a good security rule, but there is a conflict; if you want to use a webservice of a server with ajax (or flash/flex) you need to connect and grab the data you want.

mod_proxy simply makes a trick;
assume that you need to grab similar artist data from last.fm;
http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/art...ca/similar.xml

if you make an ajax request to that adress, you will get permission denied becouse of cross domain restriction, so you need to pass it to a different way on your server;

a cheap .htaccess trick makes this possible;
put this .htaccess in a folder, lets say abcde folder,

RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/$1 [P]

when you make your new ajax request to; http://www.yoursite.com/abcde/1.0/ar...ca/similar.xml
apache will automatically change it to http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/art...ca/similar.xml

so everything will be tutti-frutti!


think of my site bringing artist information from wikipedia (which will cost me 100k to fetch, 100k to show) + last.fm similar artist data ( will cost 50k to fetch 50k to show.......) if i use php's simplexml to fetch, this brings a high amount of ram (and relatively cpu) usage to my program
and such kind of a program is bringing more load to server, instead with a simple .htaccess all can be done, and i can send it to users computer and i can shape this xml in users computer, and show it to user again.

by the way this is not a hack, it is the usual way (yahoo tells this from their front page from their ajax pages)

another of my wish is, i saw a site (i really couldnt remember at the moment), there was a magic button, that shows how many months left for your hosting, and it tells nicely to its users:
let this site go!!! add 1 month more!! and when a user click it, they can add one more month with paying...a kind of donation method..
well i hate of periodical payments in my life, one thing more i hate is site ads..
my site is a kind of community site, and my faithful users wont hesistate to add one more month to make that site go on..so such kind of a button may make things a lot easy for me, and it would also be great for hostgator too..
think of a month cost is 8 dolar, then you may make this button for 10 dolar to add a month donation..
most of the time, the site (faithful) users of a site wont aware how the things are going (economically), i believe such kind of a button may give hints to them, and if oneday i needed to upgrade a dedicated hosting, i could (-economically-) check my user base if things are ready

well sorry for my english, but i think i succeeded to express myself

thanks a lot