Ask MetaFilter questions tagged with URLs

Transferrable URL from a Google Site to elsewhere?

omnigut — Wed, 09 Dec 2009 15:24:39 -0800

Friends set up a sites.google.com site with a URL that they like. I've made them realize that Google Sites won't do what they want. So I want to remove it from Google, and make it into a wordpress site, or whatever. Problem is, they want to keep the URL. Anyone know if (and how) that's possible? If I shut down their google site, will that free the URL up for me to use elsewhere (like on GoDaddy)? I asked in a google forum, but I assume I won't get a response there.

www-wrong

le morte de bea arthur — Wed, 07 Jan 2009 05:56:48 -0800

How do I prevent Firefox from adding 'www' and '.com' to local URLs? I have a web server on my local network that I access via http://test/

Whenever I forget to turn on this server (or if it goes into standby or whatever), Firefox first tries the corrrect URL, then tries http://www.test.com. I find this more annoying that I probably should.

Any idea how I can prevent this second-guessing by Firefox? It's got to be in about:config somewhere, but I'm blessed if I can find it.

Failing that, how do I learn to be less anal?

Make my urls purty!

drjimmy11 — Tue, 25 Nov 2008 16:01:08 -0800

What's the best way for me to create human-readable urls for a Wordpress site? So I've taken a job converting a very static site to one that will use Wordpress as a CMS. A couple of key points up front:

1) We are 100% committed to using Wordpress. Thanks for respecting this.
2) I will NOT be making use of any wordpress theme or allowing users to go to any Wordpress pages at all. We are using it as a CMS on the backend, and on the frontend I will write custom php pages and queries to display what i want to display.

The site as it stands now has 1000s of articles in totally flat html pages. We want to get away from that for obvious reasons. My inclination is to create one page to use over and over again, so where the old url would've been like:

www.thesite.net/article_name.html

the new url would look like:

www.thesite.net/article.php?id=124

two issues with this:
1) the site is quite popular, so a lot of people have probably bookmarked old articles and I dont want those links to die when we remove all the flat html pages.

2) I would prefer people to see human-readable urls rather than ugly querystrings.

My first instinct would be to create a big redirect file (301), sending every old article url to the new format. This addresses point one but not point two, since after the redirect the user would still see the ugly url, right? (if not, please enlighten me!)

My other thought is to use the "ugly" article.php as an include inside a wrapper, so create "article_name.php" which contains nothing but a variable for the article id and a copy of the include which takes in that variable. problems with this are a) we still clutter up our server with 1000s of files, and b) I have non-tech people messing with code and ftp, which i'd rather not.

So, what is the solution? How does mefi get those awesome clean urls like "http://ask.metafilter.com/107722/Batch-Adding-Text-File-Name-to-JPEG-Images"?

I'm guessing "107722" and "Batch-Adding-Text-File-Name-to-JPEG-Images" are some sort of aliases and not literal folders on the server. Is this something automated that is beyond the power of Wordpress? I hope not.

thanks!

Vanity URLS or backslashed directories?

Davidissimo — Fri, 16 May 2008 09:28:59 -0800

Which is better? A vanity url or a backslashed url. For instance, www.awesometown.com or www.mycompany.com/awesometown Mind you, this is an advertising question. With a product/property it seems smarter to use a vanity url for name recognition, but I understand diluting the brand is a bad idea. What's the best practices you've seen or opinions?

Who really owns a domain?

missmagenta — Fri, 21 Mar 2008 14:56:05 -0800

Who really owns a domain? If a company registers a domain under the name of an individual, who really owns the domain and what are their rights? If a hosting company registers a domain on behalf of an individual, who owns it, the individual or the company? Specifically, if the whois record lists the individual's name as the registrant can the hosting company hold the domain to ransom? If the individual wants to change hosting suppliers but keep the same domain what are their rights if the hosting company refuses? Do they have any?

fixing Firefox file/folder flexibility

bbranden1 — Wed, 12 Sep 2007 12:24:17 -0800

Is there a way to open multiple favorites in Firefox from the Windows XP file Explorer window? When I try to open a group of urls from the Windows Explorer window, my right click choices are either IE or Maxthon (an IE shell program). I'd like to open multiple favorites in Firefox, but that choice is not available, at least as an Explorer context menu choice, even if I make Firefox the default browser.

Of course Firefox can open one url or a full folder of urls within the browser, but I want to be able to open just a small group that I select from folders anywhere on the hard drive. PlainOldFavorites, the Firefox add-on is excellent, but doesn't work for this purpose. Suggestions?

Why won't this site load for only one computer on the network?

Tuwa — Thu, 05 Jul 2007 08:33:13 -0800

One certain site always times out for me. It does not for other computers on the same network. What (if anything) can I do to get it to work? I have a wireless network set up at my place, and ever since it's been set up (the last week and a half or so) I haven't been able to access elbo.ws/vanilla/ . At first I thought the site was down but last night I noticed it had a recent date in Google's search results for the front page.

So I tried going there through a proxy--in fact, through a half-dozen proxies in three different browsers--and none of them reported the "timed out" message; they all pulled the site up quickly.

My roommate can access the site directly on a Mac. I'm on a PC and can't access any part of the site in any way at all except through a proxy.

We've both tracerouted to it; the packets go through the router to the modem to the ISP and then to Verizon, where they stall at either static-72-88-198-27.nwrknj.fios.verizon.net (72.88.198.27) or static-72-88-198-28.nwrknj.fios.verizon.net. I don't know why they stall there since the IP for elbo.ws is actually 72.88.198.28. My roommate always gets the one ending in .27 and can always pull up the site. I always get .28 and can't. I've tried typing in the .27 IP and still can't.

Even though the route stalls there, for him the site loads and is fully interactive but for me the site doesn't load at all.

I haven't denied cookies from the site and it's not set up to time out if cookies are off anyway.

Neither elbo.ws nor 72.88.198.28 are in my HOSTS file.

There's no sort of internet filtering on the computer, at least not intentionally.

AVG reports the computer as clean; Spybot S&D complains about a remnant of the Alexa toolbar, a potential DSO exploit due to having IE 6.0 (which I use only for CSS compatibility testing), a Doubleclick cookie, and an atdmt cookie.

elbo.ws/vanilla isn't set up to be denied from the router (and it would be surprising indeed if it were, since my roommate's computer can access it).

This is the only site I visit that consistently does not work.

I've already talked to the site administrator and he's stumped. Short of contacting my generally unhelpful customer service, how do I go about troubleshooting the problem?

Action for sending URLs

zenpop — Sat, 12 May 2007 15:47:00 -0800

I send a lot of URLs via email. Inevitably the url's are so long I have to first go to a site like tinyurl.com and truncate the url and then copy that new url and then paste that into my email. Are there other options? Does an action exist for OS X users that would automatically highlight the url and then take it to tinyurl.com and then get the compressed url and copy it and then paste it into a designated email app's "new email" template?

Mod_Rewrite Help Wanted, Apply Within

rokusan — Fri, 02 Mar 2007 09:27:54 -0800

I am in mod_rewrite hell. What a syntax! Can someone smarter than me have a look and tell me I'm not crazy? Thanks! Okay, mod_rewrite is working and respecting my .htaccess file, so there's no installation problem. I wish to shorten URLs in this form:

www.mysite.com/dynamicpages/newstory.shtml?shownews.tmpt&showstory=122

To something like this:

www.mysite.com/news?122

So that users can type the latter and get the same results they would get from the "expanded" first version.

I know this is exactly what mod_rewrite is for, but for the life of me I can't get it to produce anything other than nasty looping errors like "Too many redirects."

Can someone demonstrate the no-doubt three-liner I need? Thanks.

Converting A Plain Text List Of URLs Into An HTML List of Clickable Links

jack_mo — Tue, 21 Feb 2006 10:11:24 -0800

What's the easiest way to convert a plain text list of URLs with descriptions into an HTML page of clickable links? I have a long list of URLs and descriptions in a plain text file, formatted like so

### This is a page about monkeys
http://www.monkeypage.com
### This is a page about weasels
http://www.weaselpage.com

and would like to convert them into an XHTML list formatted like so

This is a page about monkeys


This is a page about weasels

What would be the best way to do a conversion like this? I'm running OS 10.4.5, and I'm guessing a good method would involve command line stuff I'm aware of but don't really understand - regular expressions, grep, and the like. Alternatively, since the resulting page is destined for the web, I suppose another option would be a PHP or Perl script to convert the text file on the fly (I only mention PHP and Perl because I have some, very limited, experience with them, and would be lost if someone suggested, eg., a Python solution). I also assume some of the more advanced text editors would be up to the job (though from what I've seen of them, I'm a bit intimidated by the likes of vim or emacs!)

If this is a simple proposition, I'd be very grateful if someone could give examples of commands/possible scripts, if not, pointers to resources about manipulating text files in this way would be great too (I keep everything in plain text files, so am keen to learn about manipulating and repurposing them in general).

URL naming protocol?

tristeza — Wed, 13 Jul 2005 14:33:27 -0800

TechnoDunce question: why do some URLs start with "http://www.blah" and some just start with "http://blah"?

Safari URLs fail to load

Mo Nickels — Tue, 08 Mar 2005 10:01:31 -0800

Stoopid Safari question: URLs often only load on the second try. I type in the URL, hit enter, the URL disappears, no page loads, any URL that was there before reappears. Usually occurs with auto-complete URLs replacing an URL already in the address field. It's not this DNS issue. I cleaned out caches, deleted the history, deleted the favicons, repaired permissions, and a bunch of other stuff. I have Saft 7.5, Sogudi 4.5 and PithHelmet latest installed.

in.credulo.us

gyc — Thu, 06 Jan 2005 19:49:14 -0800

So what's so cool about del.icio.us? I don't get it. So it's an online bookmark system that you can share. What exactly is so cool about that? What do you use it for? What does it let you do that you couldn't do before? Why should people care who has what sites bookmarked?

How do I load a series of different URLs into different windows/tabs as fast as possible?

vacapinta — Mon, 15 Nov 2004 11:22:55 -0800

How do I load a series of different URLs into different windows/tabs as fast as possible? The reason I ask is that a regular train ride I take stops for about 15 seconds at a station with wireless access. I'd like to load pages which I can then read for the rest of the trip but even opening new windows and launching bookmarks is manual and slow. Any ingenious ideas?

HTML issues

XQUZYPHYR — Wed, 27 Oct 2004 13:28:25 -0800

HTML crisis: I use relative URLS on my blog because pages archive in different files- for example, a tag for a JPEG would be /images/image.jpg inside image tags. Because I use that first slash to make the relative URL work, all image tags are broken when you type or link to my site without a "www" in the url. In other words, "www.mysite.com" shows all the images fine, but "mysite.com" loads the site with little red x's everywhere. Solution? What's weird is that I load all my HTML and Flash (swf) files through relative URLs as well, and they load fine with or without a www in the URL. COuld it be a browser issue instead of a code issue? Using Windows XP with IE, currently SP2 but this problem occured in SP1 as well.

Movable Type

solistrato — Fri, 24 Sep 2004 13:01:38 -0800

In Movable Type, how do you jigger it so the URLs of the individual entries display the title of the piece, as opposed to the entry number?

Promoting a website

jeffbarr — Wed, 25 Aug 2004 06:23:10 -0800

What should be done (if anything) about a site that is capitalizing on my site's distinctive name and search engine ranking to popularize itself in a way that is totally unrelated to my site?

I run an RSS feed directory with a distinctive name, reasonably good content, and a decent rank in various search engines. Last night a "watch" application told me that 2 new sites now contain my site's domain name in their URLs.

I took a look at both of these sites, and they are simply embedding my domain name in their URLs so that they have a chance of matching on searches for the name. The actual pages are throwaway filler (as is the entire site).

I'm flattered and insulted.

My site's name is not a trademark (perhaps it should be), and I don't want to draw artificial attention to it by posting a link, and I certainly don't want to link to the offending sites.

Has anyone else had something like this happen to them? What can be done?

Movable Type Extensions

keswick — Fri, 06 Feb 2004 21:01:14 -0800

I'm worried this may be too specific for AxeMe, but here goes:

Is this sort of approach to Movable Type urls really a good idea? I've used extensions on my webpages since 1994, and dropping 'em for extended directory structures seems well, weeeiiiiiird. Has anyone here done this? Do they recommend it? Pros? Cons?