Re: [cobalt-users] RE: uppercase / lowercase subdirectories

["Steve Werby" <steve-lists@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

"Dan Kriwitsky" <webhosting@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
> Teach who to be precise? Visitors? Never happen, at least not without
> filling up your error log. Stupidity is the most abundant element in the
> universe.

LOL.

> People often transcribe a URL into their browser instead of
> clicking on a search engine link. I've seen plenty of typos in my error
> logs.

I see the same thing.  I create a lot of template-driven websites using PHP
and MySQL/PostgreSQL which are controlled by a central script that parses
the URL and pulls the proper content dynamically.  Since the SQL statements
are case-insensitive by default the URLs end up being case-insenitive too,
unless I specifically override this behavior either in the SQL statement or
PHP.  As a result, if I have a page sandiego.html, people can successfully
access it via that filename, SanDiego.html, SANDIEGO.html, sANdIegO.html or
any other version of case.  I periodically view my logs and statistical
reports and even though all links on my sites internally and through search
engines are displayed in lowercase a surprising number of people enter them
in other formats.  In a related note, when building sites like this, I
usually create a script to generate a page of all possible pages (or
categories of pages) on the site and display that when a user enters a URL
that doesn't match.  Many clients tell me that's not necessary b/c "all
users will be visiting the pages from internal buttons and only internal
buttons", but that's never the case.  You will always have people who got
the link from someone via email, wrote it down wrong, remembered it wrong,
etc. and typed in a URL that was incorrect.  If your goal is to help the
user get to the page they intended to visit, you might as well give them a
helping hand.

> That's why I use the CheckSpelling on. Years ago when I first built my

And CheckSpelling is a useful directive.  I don't use it much myself, but it
is handy.

--
Steve Werby
President, Befriend Internet Services LLC
http://www.befriend.com/