Q: I'm in the process of applying for a job, and have emailed cover letters to several businesses, nonprofits, and educational institutions. I've given everyone a URL for my résumé, but the thing is, I want to set it up so that if someone hits the page from a .com they get my business stuff first. If they hit it from a .org, they get my volunteer stuff, and from a .edu, they get my schooling. Any suggestions?
- ruprecht
A: It seems like everyone is using "dynamic pages" these days to serve multiple versions of content to different users through the same URL. One way you can do this is with Apache 1.2's XSSI (extended server-side include) module and virtual includes.
XSSI is basically just fancy talk for conditional HTML, which allows you to serve up pages based on environmental variables (like which browser users have, or which domain they're hitting your site from). Essentially, it's just an extension of NCSA Server Side Includes.
Since this module is contained in the mod_include.c, and compiled in by default, you don't have to harass an engineer to create some weird hack for you. Instead, you, the production person, can use XSSI flow-control elements to set directives based on the user's environment variables. (Some of you may remember alx's script for detecting environmental variables from Taylor's column several months ago. If you missed it, be sure to check it out.)
Apache 1.2 also includes several directives that go beyond the original NCSA definition and allow you to include modules of information in the server that minimize the number of connections necessary to generate a page. This means that if you execute elements of your page on the server side with an include, the client gets the information in one request, rather than several, as is the case if you use a CGI call.
