01.31.08

.htaccess redirects

Posted in blog, technology at 12:13 am by coldclimate

Looking though the logs for this place tonight I noticed how many people are going to old URLs which haven’t been active for months, years in some cases. 500 people a month were accessing www.coldclimate.co.uk/blog, which I retired about a year ago. Another 500 people were munching down on 2 of my homebrewed feeds www.coldclimate.co.uk/1.xml and /blog/feed.xml, neither of which have been around for about a year minmum. Throw in another few links and suddenly 1000 more pages are actually being served each month.

So I’ve added a couple of lines to my htacess file to redirect people. It’s dead simple really, add a line like “Redirect oldplace http://wwww.newplace.com/new” and any traffic that comes to /oldplace gets redirected. You have to fully qualify the new place however. Also, you htaccess file is parsed top down, you redirect /oldplace http://www.newplace.com and then in the line below redirect oldplace/really_old http://www.someotherplace.com then any traffic for oldplace/really_old will actually end up at http://www.newplace.com, not www.someotherplace.com.

As that explaination probably made as much sense as Northern Rock shares, I’d recommend this comprehencive yet easy to understand guide to htaccess. Also rememeber that htaccess can really bugger you up too

Lord knows who was visiting these long dead pages, and I suspect most of it is feed readers blindly grabbing my 404 page and not realising it, but hey, if I’ve suddenly reappeared on your radar, I’ve not been gone, honest. You may thank .htaccess’s wonderful Redirect command.

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