Redirect all useragents but one while updating site?

[JAB Creations]

I'm going to be updating my entire site soon and it's going to require a bit of testing. I want to create my own useragent and access the site while all other normal useragents are redirected to a temporary page. How can I do this? I'm running Apache 1.3 (and 2.x locally but it's not reading my .htaccess) so when I test this it will be have to be live.

John

[jdMorgan]

Why are you taking down the old site? You could easily lose your search ranking and some of your incoming links if you do this.

Leave the old stuff in place, upload the new stuff to a subdomain or a subdirectory to test it, add redirects from the old URLs to the new, and when it's all tested, just throw the switch.

You can rewrite requests from your custom user-agent or IP address to the new site's subdirectory using mod_rewrite's RewriteCond to detect your id. I keep a password-protected subdomain called 'test' for final live-server testing at test.example.com.

Jim

[JAB Creations]

It takes me about three hours to upload everything and perhaps about 20 minutes to test out all the pages to ensure they are working...

It is something I'm interested in. I'm not worried about SERPS by disabling robot's access for a few hours.