Question

I am working on a site that has dynamic content.

When you click an article, it changes to address using the push state.

Example:

http://www.some-site.com/news/ – Before clicking a news item

http://www.some-site.com/news/dynamic-url/ – after clicking news item

But as pushstate does not work in IE or older browsers, I’ve rewritten it to use jQuery.address so it changes the hash in the url instead only for IE.

The problem now, is say someone sends a link to the site to a friend that they copied from Chrome and their friend uses IE, it will start appending the new has to that url.

Example:

http://www.some-site.com/news/dynamic-url/ – URL sent to friend

http://www.some-site.com/news/dynamic-url/#!/dynamic-url – URL after friend visits the site

So, I’m stuck on how to rewrite/redirect them. As, the hash never gets sent to Apache.
I’ve seen on twitter, they do exactly what I want, but I am unable to figure out how.

https://twitter.com/#!/google gets redirected to https://twitter.com/google and it works in IE.

Any help is much appreciated and if you don’t understand please ask me to elaborate.

As suggested by David Thomas, here is the function.

var permalink = function(title, id, permalink){
    var current = siteUrl + type + (order ? '/orderBy/' + order : '');
    var newUrl = current + '/' + permalink + '/';
    if(jQuery.browser.msie){
        newUrl = '/' + permalink + '/';
        jQuery.address.value(newUrl);
    }
    else{
        stateNum++;
        window.history.pushState({state: stateNum}, title, newUrl);
    }
    jQuery('title').html('SITE - ' + title);
}

Answer 1

After thinking it through for a while, I could only find one solution.

I’ll post it here in case anyone is in a similar situation.

My solution, was a little hacky. If the browser is IE and has a fragment of url after a certain point, I count that as the name of news item. Once I have the name, I redirect them to the suitable url.

var permalink = function(title, id, permalink){
    var current = siteUrl + type + (order ? '/orderBy/' + order : '');
    var newUrl = '/' + permalink + '/';
    if(jQuery.browser.msie){
        jQuery.address.value(newUrl);
    }
    else{
        current = siteUrl + type + (order ? '/orderBy/' + order : '');
        newUrl = current + '/' + permalink + '/';
        stateNum++;
        window.history.pushState({state: stateNum}, title, newUrl);
    }
    jQuery('title').html('SITE - ' + title);
}
jQuery(document).ready(function(){
    jQuery.address.crawlable(true);
    if(jQuery.browser.msie){
        if(jQuery.address.value() == '/'){
            var currentPermalink = window.location.toString();
            currentPermalink = currentPermalink.split(type);
            if(currentPermalink[1] !== '/'){
                window.location = siteUrl + type + '/#!' + currentPermalink[1];
                jQuery.address.value(newUrl);
            }
        }
    }
});