For example, if you are logged out, Washington Post’s newsletter page 302 redirects you to a login page that then serves a 200. This means a Google search for newsletters for washingtonpost.com gets indexed with the text from the login page. If they were to serve a 401 “Unauthorized” on the pages that require logins, these login pages would not be indexed. Use caution with that scenario though. It might be better to handle search engines differently than normal users so the content can be indexed.

What if sometimes you need to take a feature offline (or even, godz forbid, the entire site) for maintenance/upgrades? I assume you provide some sort of messaging to the users. If that page serves a 200 status and Google happens to try to index during that time you get screwed by having all of that feature’s pages get indexed as a single page. It is better to have the offline message page return a 503 status so the search engine knows that the service is temporarily unavailable and to try again later.

It is becoming more common for sites to capture a 404 and try to do a site search, or similar processing, for a possible match. Frequently when this happens it is handled within the app code rather than having the web server deliver the default 404 page. At GameSpot.com, the programmer who first set this up forgot to serve the 404 status code and was returning a 200. This meant that when a duplicate game was deleted from the database, the links to it were still showing up on Google. Once we made sure the code returned a status of 404 they went away next time Google indexed the site.

Finally, don’t forget about the 400 status code. If you try to load phpBB’s forums with an invalid forum id it will return a 200 status code even though it is not a valid request. This is a good situation to serve a 400 Bad Request. Keep in mind that that you probably wouldn’t want to return a 400 if the forum id just doesn’t exist (e.g., http://www.phpbb.com/community/viewforum.php?f=123456) because it might exist at some point. At the very least, return a 404.

As a side note, with HTTP/1.1 there is a new 307 status code that is very similar to how you’re used to using 302s. It will probably be a few more years before HTTP/1.1 is the default for browsers & the 307 will be truly usable.

Join the SF MySQL Meetup for our April meetup where Bret Taylor from FriendFeed talks about how they store their data in a "schema-less" system on top of MySQL. FriendFeed stores over 250 million entries and a bunch of other data, from comments and "likes" to friend lists.

As the database has grown, they have tried to iteratively deal with the scaling issues that come with rapid growth. They did the typical things, like using read slaves and memcache to increase read throughput and sharding our database to improve write throughput. However, as FriendFeed grew, scaling their existing features to accommodate more traffic turned out to be much less of an issue than adding new features.

In particular, making schema changes or adding indexes to a database with more than 10 – 20 million rows completely locks the database for hours at a time. After some deliberation, FriendFeed decided to implement a "schema-less" storage system on top of MySQL rather than use a completely new storage system. This talk attempts to describe the high-level details of the system.

Bret Tayler is one of the founders of FriendFeed.com. Before starting FriendFeed, he was a Group Product Manager at Google, responsible for Google’s developer products. Before that, he launched Google Maps and Google Local, and before that he worked on Google’s crawling and indexing infrastructure.

• Overview
  • What is the Yahoo! Open Stack?
    • Developer Tools – YUI, Tutorials
    • YOS SDK for PHP
  • Data APIs – YQL, BOSS …
  • Social APIs – Profiles, Connections, Updates, …
  • Application Platform
    • OpenSocial Support
• How does it all work?
  • Development Workflow
• Building an open application with PHP and YOS
• Common Problems & Solutions
  • CAJA
  • OpenSocial

For the main presentation David Gomel, Senior Program Manager leading SEO within CBS Interactive, will speak to us about SEO in a Web 2.0 world. The session will cover many of the important SEO issues that involve front and back-end engineers on a daily basis. Many of the decisions that tech folks make have the potential to materially impact search engine traffic. Even if you have been to a similar talk in the past, you should consider attending as we will be discussing topics that are frequently evolving. Please bring questions!

Topics will include:

• HTML fundamentals
• CSS Usage
• JavaScript/Flash/Ajax
• Graceful Degradation
• Multimedia Content
• Duplicate Content
• Redirection
• URLs
• Bot Traffic
• Robots.txt

…And More!

David Gomel is the Senior Program Manager leading SEO within CBS Interactive. He is responsible for SEO knowledge sharing and training within the company.

Peter Zaitsev will be giving his excellent presentation “Scaling MySQL powered Web Sites by Sharding and Replication” to the upcoming SF MySQL 6:00pm on November 3rd @ the CBS Interactive (formerly CNET Networks) building in SOMA San Francisco (235 2nd St).

RSVP here: http://mysql.meetup.com/30/calendar/8912109/

Description from the 2008 Velocity conference:
When your application grows beyond capacity of a single MySQL server there are few ways to scale, with most typical being Replication and Sharding.

In this presentation you will learn how, depending on your application performance scalability and high availability goals, you can choose what proper scaling strategy will be good for you.

We also will speak about scalability limitations of replication of Replication and Sharding, implementation complexities, and aspects of operation.

Peter Zaitsev’s bio:
MySQL Performance Blog

Peter helped many companies ranging from one man startups to Fortune 500 companies with their Performance and Scaling problems on various stages starting from architecture design and down to queries and schema optimization.

Over cause of the years Peter has spoken on many International conferences focused on MySQL, Open Source, Databases or High Performance Web applications.

Before co-founding Percona Peter worked for MySQL AB as head of High Performance Group being involved in Support, Consulting, Development and working with vendors helping to optimize their software or hardware to perform well with MySQL.

Peter also was involved in number of Web Startups in the roles ranging from CTO to Consultant and has a lot of experience in MySQL and Web Applications Operations, Deployment, Quality Assurance and Development.
Please join us!

Map to CNET Networks, Inc.
When you arrive, please look for the PHP/MySQL Meetup sign pointing you to the conference room.

Look forward to seeing you there!

RSVP here: http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/

The blurb from ZendCon08:
Terry Chay, the original PHP Terrorist, is well known for his criticism and ridicule of the Ruby on Rails framework. He criticizes, mocks, and f-bombs his enemies into surrender. In this discussion, Terry will share his ideas and thoughts on making frameworks better.

Map to CNET Networks, Inc.
When you arrive, please look for the PHP Meetup sign pointing you to the conference room. Please RSVP if you are attending so that I can prepare enough snacks and beverages.

Look forward to seeing you there!

This event can be found at:
http://php.meetup.com/139/calendar/8911737/
http://www.facebook.com/event.php?eid=39294579201
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/1195581/

But as I thought about it more, I realized it didn’t really mean anything.  Let’s say for example that the IP address is considered confidential in the EU.  All companies would do is turn it into a hash and start passing that around to track the actions or ads.  If you think about that a little deeper, you’d have to end up wondering how that’s any different from the IP address itself.  It is still a token that identifies the user.

IP addresses don’t tell you anything about the user other than perhaps the area in the world from which they came.  Its not an address, not a name, not even a way in which you could contact that user.  Unless the user owns the IP block or has it assigned to a domain name where someone could do a whois lookup.  But at that point the person has already released their information into the public domain and it is no longer considered private.

It seems to me that this is just another politician talking about a hot button issue that they probably don’t know much about.  Of course that has never stopped them from trying making laws.  Whether its reasonable or not, those of us in the Internet industry will be watching this… and then just go back to what we were doing because it doesn’t really make a difference.