Cookies and error tracking

Too close to the days end, actually the day was due and the World Cup game Argentina-Germany was started when a
colleague found out that a small but crucial feature in the site that was about to go live this evening didn’t work in production.

This is not a complicated site at all, just a standard campaign site like a lot of others. One language, a nice menu structure and loads of texts. The site will even be so good that the client will re-use the complete site under other domain names.

12 min. 0-0

Everything worked out great until the test of the site was done on the other domain name. Then, the fact was there: The cookie is not working.

18 min. 0-0

I remembered having this problem with a site where a server-side redirect took place and therefor was the cookie there, but under the wrong address. But we studied the HTTP traffic intensive but did not find any evidence at all that there was a redirect taking place.

22 min 0-0

We clicked around for a while and found out there really was only one instance of the site. The other domain-names that served this site was…. hold your hat… FRAMED. Yeah, that’s right. So instead of doing a proper re-direct or simply point multiple domains to the same site it was framed. DynDNS is calling this a WebHop with a Cloaked URL.

30 min 0-0

I was leaving the party earlier and don’t really know how it ended up. But I guess we told the client to change the way they are using the domains. This is though a good example on how small, trivial things can steal a lot of time and these things are hard to count on when offering a client a new solution.
Germany won the game on penalty kicks with 4-2.