I’ve managed to get my new wiki and version of Drupal resolving to subdomains of techticker.net via Cloaked WebForwarding. The advantage of this is that the applications no longer reference really a long URL that features an IP address, port number, subdomain, and complicated PHP?variable string. So it’s easier to remember and even easier to type.
Web forwarding works by including the entire site within an invisible frame. The invisible frame references a URL that is entered in the browser address – in this case http://wiki.techticker.net – with the actual messy address hidden from view in the I-Frame.
The downside is that due to the nature of cloaked forwarding, all pages in the subdomain and/or cloaked site now feature the same short URL regardless of how far down the folder hierarchy/site structure you navigate. So if you find a page in particular that you really like there’s no easy way to bookmark it to come back to later.
With that said though the wiki engine I use – MediaWiki – does feature a WatchList tool that will hopefully provide a workaround for the moment as it relies on MediaWiki’s knowledge of itself and its internal page references. Hopefully this will operate independly of the web forwarding settings. I’ll need to test this to be sure.
Additionally some browsers such as Firefox will let you remove I-frames manually [Right-Click/Ctrl-Click —> This Frame —> Show Only This frame] – however I haven’t figured out how to do this in IE yet. Plus removing the I-frame will display the messy URL again, so unless you’re bookmarking the page you’re not likely to remember the correct pathing.
The other downside is that navigating to another site via a link in the page will result in the cloaked URL continuing to display in the browser address of the external site. For example if I include a link to Flickr in the wiki and you access the image – the following page at flickr.com will continue to display wiki.techticker.net, rather than flickr.com.
This isn’t particularly good practice I admit, but I haven’t found a workaround for it yet aside from setting all external links to load in a new window.
Some sites – noteable Wikipedia – will run a check when initially loading their site and will remove any I-frames it finds.
I use ZoneEdit.com for my cloaked forwarding needs. They’re free and reliable.
