Blog archives for the day Monday, January 12th, 2009

I always tried to avoid using the .htaccess file as it either works really well or will take down the entire site. The code below will work on most sites using apache as long as they have modrewrite turned on and you edit the rules to suit your domain.
You may ready be using a .htaccess file on your server so double check as it may not show up on all FTP programs.

But why do you need to use one, well the short answer is you don’t but the long answer is it can help a lot to stop duplicate content being taken off search engines and in turn help improve your SEO.
For example how often do you see urls like www.bbc.com/index.html ?

The code below will redirect any variation on your homepage to just one. it will add the www. to the domain name and remove the index.html or index.php which ever you might be using.

RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^somedomain\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.somedomain.com/$1 [R=301,L]

RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{THE_REQUEST} ^[A-Z]{3,9}\ /index.html(.*)\ HTTP/ [NC]
RewriteRule .* http://www.somedomain.com/ [R=301,L]

The idea behind this was to aid design and usability by adding a label inside the input box to give an indication of what it was for. It might not be a search box, maybe you want to add labels for name and address boxes who knows.

Click the input box below and see how the “search” disappears leaving it empty for the user to edit. If the user clicks and clicks off leaving it empty the label will return to “Search”

Here is how it works.

A basic Javascript function to control the input box called “test” This function basicaly says. Check if the box is empty, if it is make it’s value “Search”.
The input box also calls Javascript “onclick” to clear the input and “onblur” to call the function below.