X-Rev-Canonical on Ars Technica

Just added X-Rev-Canonical headers to articles on Ars Technica.

I just republished the past 40 articles, so those will currently be the only ones sporting the headers. Once we get around to doing full republish of the site—we use Movable Type and push out really light PHP files to a cluster of Lighttpd front ends)—all the articles we’ve ever published will respond with their short urls in both the HTTP header and in the HTML <head>

This will make it much easier for Twitter clients and other Twittery things to grab our short URL and make use of it. By sticking the short URL into the HTTP header they don’t have to pull down 50k of HTML and parse out the proper element.

If you want to try out some test URLs:

http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2009/04/devs-invited-to-test-push-notifications-in-iphone-os-30.ars

http://arstechnica.com/gaming/news/2009/04/wolverine.ars

http://arstechnica.com/microsoft/news/2009/04/third-laptop-hunters-ad-not-even-all-kids-want-macs.ars

HTTP/1.1 200 OK
Connection: close
X-Rev-Canonical: http://arst.ch/8b
Content-Type: text/html
Date: Sat, 11 Apr 2009 23:51:35 GMT
Server: lighttpd/1.4.20