Suggestion for the new AskTom.oracle.com site

Suggestion for the new AskTom.oracle.com site

You should write a wrapper procedure that will be called via mod_rewrite to 
handle .html links to all of the dynamic content pages (questions) so that it 
can be indexed by search engines.  All decent forum sites have this implemented 
already -- it's fairly simple to do.

for instance this question "Comments on the Beta Ask Tom":

   http://govt.oracle.com/pls/apex/f?p=100:11:0::::P11_QUESTION_ID:3000346465516

could be linked via:

   http://govt.oracle.com/topics/Comments_on_the_Beta_Ask_Tom.html

mod_rewrite can re-write it to (example):

   http://govt.oracle.com/pls/apex/topic_handler.do?p_topic=Comments_on_the_Beta_Ask_Tom.html

you will code topic_handler.do package/procedure to receive p_topic name and to 
internally call APEX engine to render it.

mod_rewrite bit that will handle this is:

RewriteCond %{REQUEST_URI} ^/topics/.* [NC]
RewriteRule ^/topics/(.*)\.html$ /pls/apex/topic_handler.do?p_topic=$1 [PT]

If you do this make sure to create robots.txt that will disallow indexing of 
the mod_plsql path to avoid duplicate content being picked up by search engines 
... then create a "sitemap" with "paged links" (25 or so links per page) to all 
topics and place it on the homepage.  Here's the gotcha though ... the homepage 
needs to render without being redirected to the mod_plsql path such as when I 
go to:

   http://asktom.oracle.com/

I should just stay there but instead I am actually redirected to:

   http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:1:

that would not work ... since robots.txt would prevent the robot from getting 
to the sitemap link.  What should happen is another "silent" rewrite that will 
keep the path at:

   http://asktom.oracle.com/

while internally re-writing the call to:

   http://asktom.oracle.com/pls/ask/f?p=4950:1:

How?  Here's an example:

RewriteCond %{http_host} ^asktom\.oracle\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^/$ /pls/ask/f?p=4950:1: [PT]