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Editorial Team
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Asked: 2026-06-04T02:31:04+00:00

Some websites like for example http://www.idealo.co.uk seem to serve only static html , although

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Some websites like for example http://www.idealo.co.uk seem to serve only static html, although their content is dynamic.

For example if I navigate through a certain category, I get a link to a static html page:

http://www.idealo.co.uk/cat/5666/electric-guitars.html

Now if I apply a custom filter, again I get a link to something that seems to be static html:

http://www.idealo.co.uk/cat/5666F456496-735760-1502100/electric-guitars.html

How is this achieved? Are there any frameworks out there that help to "pre-generate" all possible dynamic pages, in such way that whenever a new input is given, the page already exists (i.e. the static html is already available)?

Background: we run a small search engine for real estate offers. Offers are updated by our scraper once a day (the content is static through the day). The content is searchable on a Ruby-on-Rails website.
As the traffic increases, performance is becoming an issue. I’m wondering if there is any framework / tool that could batch-generate all our searches so that we could serve static html.

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1 Answer

  1. Editorial Team

    Their site isn’t dynamic. They’re using URL rewriting (e.g. mod_rewrite) to translate the input URLs into a request that can be satisfied by a script.

    For example:

    /cat/5666/electric-guitars.html

    Might be rewritten to:

    /cat.php?id=5666

    A quick trick to test this is to go to /cat/5666/foo.html

    The use of .html in this case is probably to hide what kind of scripting is used on their site, as a weak security-through-obscurity measure.

    In response to your problem – no, there’s no (easy) way to generate all possible results into static HTML files. You’re looking at potentially billions of permutations. If you’re having performance issues, look into performance profiling, caching, query optimisation, etc.

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