When Logic Goes Out the Windows®
Some days, computers are like George Milton from Steibeck’s Of Mice and Men, ushering little old me through a brave new world of terrifying technology that i scarcely understand. Other days, computers are like Lennie Small, the idiot man-child who just wants to stroke things that’s soft.
This morning, we tried to create a 301 redirect to fire http://untoldentertainment.com traffic to http://www.untoldentertainment.com. i hit the non-www address in Internet Explorer, and the browser decided it would be a good helper and pop up this message:
Wait … what?
Apparently, Microsoft hired Douglas Adams to write a few of their warning prompts before he died.
Ryan Henson Creighton is a Toronto-based game developer, and founder of Untold Entertainment Inc., specializing in online games for kids, teens, tweens and preschoolers.
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what the? a 301 should be perfectly fine for that. How/why/what is IE thinking? “trust”???
I can’t imagine being Microsoft where everyone screams about how terrible security is on the machines and so when you up security, everyone complains on how much they are being babied.
But Paolo, read closely: “The current web page is trying to open a site in your Trusted Sites List. Do you want to allow this?” Shouldn’t the very fact that the site is trusted trump any confirmation prompt IE throws at me? It’s like saying “You’ve identified Uncle Pete as someone who is approved to pick your son up from school. Uncle Pete is here now. We’re just calling to ask if it’s okay that he picks your son up from school.”
Don’t use a 301 – that’s lazy – edit the httpd.conf and setup the host properly.
Here, I will do the work for you:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.example\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://example.com$1 [R=301,L]
That’s all fine and good for people who can see the matrix, and who have host access. We’re hampered by a cpanel interface with our host. And just to make you gasp in shock and dismay, i’ll offer this: we don’t have shell access!
Its still a 301 – but when its in httpd config it should stop IE pop-ups – OR you could just get a better domain host… godaddy.com
Me thinks its time you ramp it up and host your own site. CPanel/Webmin etc. is garbage since you will learn nothing about what your doing when your using it. Time to be a real boy and use real toys :)
Fine for you to say – this is your area of interest. i’d much rather make a game than futz around with infrastructure.
My bad. I see it now.
I remember reading that this is a known registry bug with IE 6. Or are you using IE 7?
IE v 7.0.5730.13.
It’s nothing to worry about. Just small post that i found somewhat amusing, that’s getting some folks (MAAAATTT) a little heated for whatever reason. :)
Pfft. Try switching to a REAL browser, like w3m.
Man, this post is bringing out the compusnob in everybody.
The trick is to just completely stop developing for IE page renders.
The stats speak for themselves – April 2009 – Firefox = 47.1% usage. IE7 = 23.2%, not even half that of Firefox.
http://www.w3schools.com/browsers/browsers_stats.asp
Wait — Matt, are you serious? Stop developing for IE7 because “only” one in four people use it?
Those are the browser stats for the http://www.w3schools.com site. That site is made for web designers. The general population still overwhelmingly uses Internet Explorer for their web browsing.
“Wait — Matt, are you serious? Stop developing for IE7 because “only” one in four people use it?”
Not so much IE7, since 80-90% of the time FF compatible site will render properly in 7. But as for 6, yes we need to stop developing for 6 compatibility. IE8 looks like another step in the right direction, but it will never stand up to a open-source web browser.
Depending on your client, I don’t think you can stop developing for IE 6 compatibility. I thought I’d get away from programming for IE 6 since leaving government consulting and going commercial, but there are still a huge number of IE 6 users even in the private sector that are unwilling to move.
And yeah, my Microsoft roots came out. :)
They are not willing to update their browsers because the content people like you are developing still works in it. Why should I have to have an extra set of CSS conditions just to get my content right in ONE browser? We are talking about a piece of software that was released for use in August 2001, a time when the internet was a very different place. How many other applications on your computer are you running from 2001?
Unfortunately, I am expert in this area.
Allow me to clear up some misinformation.
The 301 redirect is fine fine fine, and using “httpd.conf” while cooler and it sounds sooo smart won’t change a thing. The local browser is responding to the 301 request, why would it care about a server side config? On his local machine, Ryan simply addded http://www.untoldentertainment.com as a trusted site, so anytime a regular untrusted site tries to redirect to it this message will appear. He could solve this by untrusting http://www.untoldentertainment.com, or by trusting *.untoldentertainment.com. But then we’d miss the comedy.
With regards to the HTML discussion, allow me to weigh in. All the new CSS, HTML, DIVs yield the same crappy pages as August 2001. Talking about the best approach is like trying to be the king of an ant hill. Aside from plug-ins (Flash, Unity, InstantAction, Google O3D), Web browsers stopped innovating years ago. Great page design & graphics make it appear otherwise. Ajax? A worse version of what plug-ins already offered years ago. Although I’m extremely excited about the lack of a Back button and Google crawling that Ajax offers. Compare videogame progress since August 2001 to browser progress, and you’ll understand why I weep every time I read people arguuing about HTML crap. ‘Cuz it’s crap. CRAP!
crap.