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Adding Ajax
book

Adding Ajax

by Shelley Powers
June 2007
Intermediate to advanced content levelIntermediate to advanced
400 pages
9h 52m
English
O'Reilly Media, Inc.
Content preview from Adding Ajax

Understanding Your Client Base

The amount of Ajax functionality that you introduce to your site depends on more than just how much you're willing to add and maintain. Even the niftiest technology is going to fall flat if it doesn't provide an added value, or worse, locks your users out of the site. What you will discover, though, is that if you listen to the feedback from your client base, you'll be able to use a little scripting and a few in-page web services to really increase the usability of your site.

Discovering Your Clients

The first step in your Ajax makeover is discovering all you can about the people who visit your site so that you plan accordingly. Your best friends in this regard are your site's logs. The following log entry is from one of my sites, and it is a fairly typical example:

5x.x2.x8.xx0 - - [31/Aug/2006:03:09:27 +0000] "GET /wp-content/themes/
bbgun/bbgung.png HTTP/1.1" 200 90338 "http://burningbird.net/wp-content/themes/bbgun/
style.css" "Mozilla/5.0 (Windows; U; Windows NT 5.1; en-US; rv:1.8.0.6)
Gecko/20060728 Firefox/1.5.0.6"

This log displays the date, the resource accessed, and a string containing information about the client's operating system and browser. In this case, the browser is Firefox version 1.5.0.6, and the operating system is Windows. Another line from the log is:

x0.xx3.1xx.xx4 - - [31/Aug/2006:03:14:48 +0000] "GET /wp-content/themes/ words/eyesafe.png HTTP/1.1" 404 9058 "http://burningbird.net/" "Mozilla/5.0 (Macintosh; U; PPC Mac OS X Mach-O; ...
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Publisher Resources

ISBN: 9780596529369Supplemental ContentErrata Page