Redirecting Pain

Moving a website can be simple, but often the thing I find most troubling is the thing that I am most afraid of dealing with. Like 301 re-directs. There seem to be very few constants about dealing with the beautifully documented and clear examples of how to create “a” 301 re-direct in the LAMP environment.

Anyone new to this process please learn from my mistakes. I do all of my work from the MAMP perspective, so my inexperience with certain tools often leads to issues. Everything about the file transfer and relocation of source worked out just fine but as I began adding redirects to the htaccess file the server would send me 500 Internal Error screens.

Panicked and unsure of what I had done wrong, I began a long stretch of testing and experimenting with different combination(s) of re-direct formats to solve the error. One such resource was the ndesign-studio site. After a night of testing the issue that I couldn’t seem to overcome was simply this; if I add more than one redirect line at a time to the htaccess file before updating it on the site, there would be an error. No matter if the formatting was identical from line to line. In a fit of desperate frustration, I entered all of the redirects one at a time to eliminate the error screens.

This morning I asked DataBoy as well as my good friend Seth Gerard about this, and both of them suggested that using the standard application TextEdit was the issue. Apparently, it was not inserting the proper line break character so the server was reading one long line and then grinding to a halt.  Both of them suggested that by merely changing the editor that I was using, this issue should not appear again. TextMate entered the conversation but I think that I will continue to use Coda and stop relying on the simple text editor to do all those little dirty jobs.

Note for future web people, don’t use TextEditor to adjust your redirects, or you will have some trouble.

Zach