[vox-tech] moving an url gracefully

[Micah J. Cowan]

On Wed, Dec 14, 2005 at 01:52:20PM -0500, Aaron A. King wrote:
> Forgive my ignorance, but is this something that must be done by reconfiguring 
> the server?  Or can one put the 301 redirect into an HTML page sitting at the 
> old site?

You can't. There is a non-standard, but de facto standard way to
accomplish something very similar in HTML, by using <meta
http-equiv="Refresh" value="0; http://new-url/">, but you wouldn't want
to use that unless you really had no control over the server
/whatsoever/, even through local configs (.htaccess). There are pretty
good reasons not to use that method most of the time; and it also fails
to programatically notify indexers or user agents that the new
destination replaces the old one (as a 301 does--though I have no idea
how smart indexers are about that sort of thing).

Apache (and maybe other servers) supports the concept of an ".asis"
document (as-is), which gets served exactly as is, and includes the
appropreate HTTP headers _in_the_document_. However, IIRC, Apache
doesn't normally have these set up by default, and so if you're able to
get that working, you'd probably be able to get the mod_rewrite stuff
working as well (which is a generally better approach).
-- 
HTH,

Micah J. Cowan
micah at cowan.name