A few days ago I wrote about a problem I had with some javascript ad code defering execution. Well another problem arose today with the code, and I thought I’d share the solution.
Some pages on the site I’m developing on are served over https, others are served over http. They share a common template so the same ad code is served across all pages. At the moment they serve purely over http, and this is great most of the time, however when the page is served over https a security alert is shown asking the user if they want to show unsecure content. Most users would say no in this situation so our ads won’t be shown.
What we need is a way for ads to be shown if a user is on a secure or normal connection.
Thankfully our ad provider allows us to request the same ad in either http or https by just changing the protocol, e.g. http://ad... or https://ad... .
The ad is written out using a document.write statement and is meant to be executed as the page is rendering.
We need to detect how the current page is being served, so we know what protocol to request the ad in.
This is easy in JavaScript, we can just query the value document.location.protocol. This returns either ‘http:’ or ‘https:’. Note the trailing colon…
We can use the value document.location.protocol directly, but just incase another protocol has been used, we can default everything to http if https hasn’t been used. The following code will help here…
var protocol = 'https:' == document.location.protocol ? 'https' : 'http';
Here we are seeing if document.location.protocol is the value ‘https:’, if it is set the value of protocol to ‘https’, else set it to ‘http’.
Let’s look at the original ad code…
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (window.adgroupid == undefined) {
window.adgroupid = Math.round(Math.random() * 1000);
}
document.write('>scr'+'ipt language="javascript1.1" src="http://adserver.adtech.de/addyn|3.0|311.0|3328078|0|225|ADTECH;cookie=info;alias=FindClassicCars+Maserati+7+leaderboard;loc=100;target=_blank;key=key1+key2+key3+key4;grp='+window.adgroupid+';misc='+new Date().getTime()+'"></scri'+'pt>');
//-->
</script>
We can take our earlier ternary expression to embed the protocol directly into the ad code like this.
<script type="text/javascript">
<!--
if (window.adgroupid == undefined) {
window.adgroupid = Math.round(Math.random() * 1000);
}
document.write('>scr'+'ipt language="javascript1.1" src="'+( 'https:'==document.location.protocol?'https':'http') +'://adserver.adtech.de/addyn|3.0|311.0|3328078|0|225|ADTECH;cookie=info;alias=FindClassicCars+Maserati+7+leaderboard;loc=100;target=_blank;key=key1+key2+key3+key4;grp='+window.adgroupid+';misc='+new Date().getTime()+'"></scri'+'pt>');
//-->
</script>
The ad code will now serve ads to our customers if they are on either a normal or secure page, and our ad team is happy again.
You can change
( ‘https:’==document.location.protocol?’https’:’http’) +’://
to
document.location.protocol +’//