🚀 go-pugleaf

At 10:52 AM 10/9/98 -0400, Valdivia, Eve I. wrote:
>You have a good point.
>
>I worked on a webiste called the Tour of DC and a one point we decided to
>change ISP's. People that linked to us without notifying us ended up with
>dead links because our address had changed. We could have notified them if
>we knew they were linking to us.

The solution here (as well as in any other situation in which the webmaster
needs to reroute incoming traffic) is to write a page containing a
"refresh" meta tag.  For instance, suppose you want to send users who are
trying to access www.oldurl.com to www.newurl.com; in this case you would
write the following code and use it as the default home page for
www.oldurl.com:

<HTML>

  <HEAD>
    <TITLE>Home page of Old URL</TITLE>
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh"
    CONTENT="0; url=http://www.newurl.com/">
  </HEAD>

  <BODY>
  </BODY>
</HTML>

Incoming user will be automatically rerouted to www.newurl.com.  The number
"0" represents the number of seconds the server waits until the redirect
takes place (in this case, 0 seconds).

A variation on this is to display an alert message before redirecting the
user, stating the existence of the new URL:

<HTML>

  <HEAD>
    <TITLE>Home page of Old URL</TITLE>
    <META HTTP-EQUIV="refresh"
    CONTENT="10; url=http://www.newurl.com/">
  </HEAD>

  <BODY>
<H2>This site has moved to http://www.newurl.com/.  You will be
automatically sent to the site in 10 seconds.  Please adjust your bookmarks
and links.</H2>
  </BODY>
</HTML>


Of course, the catch here is that you have to maintain www.oldurl.com in
order to host the redirect page.  Unfortunately, this may not always be
possible, even for a little while.

Brian Pomeroy
lunar@voicenet.com
http://www.geocities.com/Athens/6346/bio.htm
Children's Hospital of Philadelphia - http://www.chop.edu/