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Managing canonical URLs at a walk-in clinic
30 Jul 2024
How a walk-in clinic deals with canonical URLs — and what usually goes wrong.
The problem: query-string copies of the same page. This breaks canonical URLs for a walk-in clinic.
We deployed a fix for canonical URLs at 5 PM on a Friday. It worked, but if it had not, we would have had no one available. We no longer push to production after Thursday noon.
HTTPS is table stakes, but canonical URLs is where trust actually lives for a walk-in clinic. A padlock with a misconfigured record behind it is decoration, not security.
You do not need a status page if you have never gone down. a walk-in clinic is on month fourteen of zero downtime, and the secret is boring: correct canonical URLs and a host that does not oversell.
When a walk-in clinic asked for a quote on canonical URLs, we sent a one-paragraph email instead of a slide deck. They signed the same day.
The most expensive outage for a walk-in clinic was not a hack — it was query-string copies of the same page. Nobody attacked anything. The config just drifted.
Related work on this site follows the same principle: one job, a real inbox, no theatre. a walk-in clinic did not need four analytics dashboards to know that Tuesdays are slow.
We checked the WHOIS for a walk-in clinic and found the domain was registered under a former employee. Transferring it took more time than fixing canonical URLs.
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