Use .htaccess to redirect non www to www

by Posted in Code
 

htaccess redirectIt’s is considered good practice, for both SEO and users, to have your website resolve to one URL. Technically speaking www.domain.com is a subdomain of domain.com. Users often type www. prior to the domain in the address bar. So to keep that formality consistent with your users you can redirect the traffic on domain.com to www.domain.com.

.htaccess

If your website is hosted on an apache server, this redirect from non www to www is a simple implementation. Add this to your .htaccess file.

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

Add the above code to you .htaccess file and replace domain.com with your domain name.

I have another post on how to redirect www to non-www with .htaccess.

Twitter Listens and Updates iPhone App

by Posted in Social
 

Twitter recently announced an update to their iPhone app that made changes in a direct response to user feedback.

No More Twitter Quick Bar

To much jubilation, the Quick Bar was removed from the feed view. The release that introduced the Quick Bar created quite a stir in the Twitter app community. With minimal screen real estate, users wanted their content on the screen and not suggested content.

Retweet and Quote Tweet together at last.

The Twitter app also introduces a nice adjust to the user interface. The app now organizes the Retweet and Quote Tweet functionality into the same menu item. This change makes usability sense as twitter suggests the Quote Tweet functionality as the
best practice means to share someone’s Tweet while adding your own comments. Possibly to the dismay of Twitter most users still use the Retweet function to share and contribute, so to satisfy user adoption this user interface move works.

To access the menu item select the cycling arrows from the tweet action menu.

twitter for iphone

Under that menu item is where the user now selects the desired sharing method; Retweet or Quote Tweet.

twitter for iphone app

How to comment in a .htaccess file

by Posted in Code
 

comment htaccess fileThe .htaccess file is commonly used to redirect traffic and search engines to pages that have been moved or when an entire site moves to a new domain. Developers will commonly include comments in code to instruct what the next snippet of code will do. This commenting standard helps for projects that are managed by a team or may be transitioned to another developer.

Commenting in the .htaccess file is done by adding a # at the beginning of the line(s) that you would like to comment. The # is required before each line of comment. Essential this instructs the server to ignore that line in the .htaccess file.

Example:

# redirect section
RewriteEngine onRewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^domain-one\.com$ [OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.domain-one\.com$
RewriteRule (.*) http://www.domain-two.com/$1 [L,R=301] 
# end redirect section 
# another comment line