Forwarding URLs & Their Descendants - RedirectMatch & .htaccess

Published by eltonone on April 29, 2008 under Scripts

If you want to redirect a whole site and all descendant pages to another URL, you can put this in your .htaccess file in the root of your server:

RedirectMatch ^/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/TV_Links

Took me a while to ensure not only www.blah.com and http://www.blah.com were redirected, but also blah.com and blah.com/foo/bar and so on. This technique seems to work well in these instances but I have yet to master regular expressions so if any one has any pointers on trimming the end of the URL (for example ensuring http://www.blah.com/something?glass=halfempty does not become http://www.urlforwardedto.com?glass=halfempty), I would be very greatful.

The curse of php files forcing themselves to download and not display normally on your localhost

Published by eltonone on November 12, 2007 under Scripts, Web

When you want to change your PHP version (like from 4 to 5) you need to put in your local .htaccess file the line:

AddHandler application/x-httpd-php5 .php

This works fine on a web server, but when applied to your localhost it causes your browser to try to download the .php file as oppossed to display it as normal.

I went mental for a few months and completely stopped web scripting because MAMP and my localhost refused to let me see my local web pages. I thought for a while it was something to do with MIME Types, but I could find no conclusive evidence to support this.

Jay from RebuildTheRobots randomly discovered this when upgrading from PHP4 to PHP5.

Remember: Don’t despair. There is always a solution.