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<h2>Redirects</h2>

part of the <a href="index.html">ArsDigita Community System</a>
by <a href="http://photo.net/philg/">Philip Greenspun</a>

<hr>

<blockquote>
Alternative title:  "papering over your historical stupidity."
</blockquote>

<p>

Suppose that you're a stupid person like me and back in 1993 published
URLs such as "/~philg/philg.html".  You now want users to get
"/philg/index.html".  The redirect subsystem is for you!

<p>

Hey, doesn't AOLserver already have an aliases module?  Yes, but it
assumes that you never move stuff off your server.  The ArsDigita
Community System redirect module let's you do the following:

<ul>
<li>Redirect "foo" to "bar" (JustOne)
<li>Redirect anything that starts with "foo" to "bar" (Inherit)
<li>Redirect anything that starts with "foo" to whatever came after the
"foo" but starting now with "bar" (Pattern)
</ul>

You specify redirects in /parameters/ad.ini.  All of the work happens in
/tcl/ad-redirect.tcl

<P>

Here's an example:

<blockquote>
<pre>
[ns/server/yourservername/acs/redirect]
Pattern=/~philg|/philg
JustOne=/~philg/new-zealand/nz-mtn-bike.text|/nz/nz-mtn-bike.html
Inherit=/bp/czech-FAQ.html|http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~sever/Czech.homepage.html
</pre>
</blockquote>

The first line ensures that old URLs with a ~philg will still work.  It
is a "Pattern" redirect spec so that "/~philg/photo/hand-coloring.html"
goes to "/philg/photo/hand-coloring.html" rather than simply to "/philg".

<p>

The second line redirects the user from a .text file in one directory to
a .html file in another redirectory.

<p>

The third line redirects anything starting with "/bp/czech-FAQ.html" to
a server at Harvard (the author of this FAQ is a Harvard staff member
and it is easier for him to maintain the content there now that Harvard
has moved into the Internet Age).  You might think that this would be a
logical candidate for JustOne rather than Inherit but I wanted to make
sure that something like "/bp/czech-FAQ.html#section1" would also get
redirected.


<hr>
<a href="http://photo.net/philg/"><address>philg@mit.edu</address></a>
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