Question

I couldn’t really word the title very well, but here’s my problem: I’ve got a webpage that reads from a database each time the user clicks a button, the content is then replaced for part of the page.

Because it is an ajax load, everything is done in the background, and so the URL stays the same. This wasn’t be a problem at all until I realised that I will want to have a different Facebook comments box for each set of content that is loaded – so if someone comments, it is posted to their facebook profile, people click on the link and are then taken to different content.

So… what I need is some way of referencing each set of content, and I’ve found a site that does exactly that (I’m sure there are a lot of them).

Here’s the link.

Each set of content has a different ‘hash code’ (because I don’t know the actual name for it) which is appended to the URL – in this case the code is “#1922934”, this allows people to post links to it that specific set of content on Facebook etc. – and also allows a different Facebook comment box for each set of content.

Does anyone know how such a set-up can be achieved or how these ‘hash codes’ work?

Answer 1

Here’s a document from wikipedia on it.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fragment_identifier][1]

The main idea is that URI fragments are used because they don’t cause a page reload. They also can be used to refer to anchors on a web page.

What I would do is on page load use JavaScript to read the URI fragment (location.hash) then make a request to your server to load the comments etc. The URI fragment cannot be read by a server and is only found through a client (browser)