Lunarpages, FrontPage, .htaccess rewrite and redirects - problem

Want to redirect domain.com - www.domain.com

[Northstone]

Hello - I wanted to do a redirect from domain.com to www.domain.com, as apparently google considers my www.domain.com to be a mirror to domain.com. I am hosted by Lunarpages, and I use Frontpage (newbie). If I do any kind of a mod_rewrite to my .htaccess, I get a 500 error. The changes I did were a couple of variations:

Inside public_html/.htaccess:
(variation 1):

Options +FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^(www\.)?yourother.example.com [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.example.com/$1 [L,R=301]

and, per Lunarpages own suggestion:

Options + FollowSymLinks
RewriteEngine On
RewriteBase /
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R,L]

I did see on webseodesign that FP extensions will crash, unless .htaccess in the vti_bin, as well as the public directory is modified from "Options None" to "Options + FollowSymLinks", so I amended those as well.

However, any mod_rewrite I did just brought up one of two things. Either the redirect worked, and all example.com resolved to www.example.com, but then I could not use my FP to publish pages, as I got a permissions error every time and my local files remained unmatched. Or, as it is now, I can publish, but I cannot do a redirect and I have what google considers to be a mirror site.

Is there any way out of this quagmire? [According to Lunarpages, any of the following can cause Frontpage Extensions to corrupt:

1. Using FTP to upload or edit site files.

2. Running CGI scripts...
3. Editing ".htaccess" files. FrontPage uses ".htaccess" files. Editing your .htaccess files may corrupt your FrontPage extensions]

Any help would be appreciated. I have been up for over a month and am getting nowhere in google - no stats on the sitemap page, except the index for www.domain.com. I am afraid I am getting spanked for duplicate content.

Thanks,

Paul

[edited by: jdMorgan at 6:50 am (utc) on Dec. 13, 2005]
[edit reason] No URLs or copyrighted material, please. See TOS. [/edit]

[jdMorgan]

The RewriteCond !^$ (blank check) in your first ruleset is not needed. It is only needed if you do a check for NOT(main_domain_name) so that HTTP/1.0 requests (which do not include a HOST header, won't cause an infinite loop.

The correct syntax is "Options +FollowSymLinks", not "Options + FollowSymLinks", and it would not surprise me if this caused errors.

You might also want to check with your host and make sure that UseCanonicalName is set to 'off' in httpd.conf -- this could cause your trouble if it is 'on'. Other than that, I can't advise further since I don't mess with FrontPage Extensions.

Jim

[Marcia]

I once brought a FP site down completely for an entire day by doing something simple in .htaccess and what the host told me is that FP and .htaccess do not play well together.

In essence, if you can't use htaccess or normal CGI scripting, then you're being crippled by how you're using FP.

Plenty of people use it as a fine page creation tool once they learn how to work around it's peculiarities and the crud it generates. So use it, but just don't use FP extensions, because that's what messes everything up.

No, you don't need the webbots and other proprietary garbage that bloats the code and tears the heart out of normal servers. Ditch the FP extensions, parse .htm pages for includes if you want, and use SSI or even better yet, PHP includes. One simple change in a text file updates the whole site for common elements like navigation, without having to "re-publish" the entire site, suck up resources and place unnecessary limitations on functionality.

[Northstone]

Thanks everyone. I have been web publishing for all of about 4 weeks now, and I've learned my lesson with FP. Never again.

However, my site is up and alive with it and at this point I will stay with it - Marcia, thanks for the suggestions. The FP extensions, once enabled, cannot be undone, on my host. It would be a major pain to do the revamp of my site, I fear.

However, the good news is that hopefully I have resolved the issue. JDMorgan - I saw this too, and changed Option from "None" to "+FollowSymLinks" in my vti_bin and subs. (I think indeed I did have "+ Follow..").

This seemingly enabled the mod_rewrite. I have tested by checking the redirect from domain.com - and domain.com now successfully redirects to www.domain.com. Further, I don't seem to be having a problem with FP, publishing updates, and synchronizing my remote and local files. Knock on wood, I think I'm in the clear.

Many thanks to all. Nice to join the community.

Paul

PS: Marcia - thanks for your specific recommendations on working with FP - I just finished bringing all pages to W3C validation - a complete bill of health (at least, it was - will do again in a week in the event any mods I've done have brought me afoul once again); next would be to look at SSI, for example, my googleads and their format - default is not something I'd like, so I want to do a SSI. But as I am so new to all this, one big chunk at a time).