Redirect versus refresh

[jbailey]

I spent the weekend cleaning up my vanity site, CSSizing it and such. Since I moved a few documents around, I wanted to make sure that they were still findable. Most of the site wasn't PHP before (it is now for common navigation / footer includes, etc.) so I had the challenge of how to send people to the new pages.

It's most common to find "refresh" pages, ones that you go and they redirect you to another location with a 0 timeout (and often a cute little notice that says if your browser doesn't DTRT, you should click the link). There doesn't seem to be another meta tag that could do the redirect trivially.

This is another case where PHP wound up being useful. Since I moved my weblog from my homesite to LiveJournal a while ago to let comment spam be Someone Else's Problem, I had that and a whole directory of stuff underneath it that was no longer there.

jbailey@titanium:~/web$ cat weblog.php
<?php
header("HTTP/1.0 301 Document Moved");
header("Location: http://jbailey.livejournal.com/");
exit();
?>

Now works for http://www.raspberryginger.com/jbailey/weblog and any of the directories underneath it. Another side trick to this is that if I had a file foo.html, I can create a foo.html.php file with the same sort of thing in it. Apache's automatic extension tracking will find the .php file and sort it out automatically.

One thing I did discover is that if I have "weblog.tar.gz" and "weblog.php" sitting side by side, apache will prefer the .tar.gz file. *sigh*

Comments

[malpingu.livejournal.com]

Oh, I agree. It's not the language per se but rather the way it is usually deployed and used by people unaware of security matters.

For instance, the configuration files for web applications are often left publicly read-/writeable within the application webspace, for ease of administration at many hosting sites. Python applications, on the other hand, are typically deployed as programs invoked ether by a web-server module or CGI interface, in which neither the program image (source or executable) itself nor its configuration files are publicly accessbile.