atom thoughts

I just recently changed my site to permanently redirect http://www.atomgiant.com and http://blog.atomgiant.com to just http://atomgiant.com so please make a note of it.

This will make it easier for me to track my site stats, but just as important, it will have a positive impact on search engine rankings.

There are many ways to perform this redirect such as via meta redirects, but I decided to use Lighttpd for two reasons:

1. Lighttpd makes this really easy.
2. The redirect is instantaneous. With meta redirects there can be a very noticeable delay.

My lighttpd redirect code is as follows:

$HTTP["host"] =~ "^(www.|blog.)" {
    url.redirect = (
        "^/(.*)" => "http://atomgiant.com/$1",
        "" => "http://atomgiant.com/",
        "/" => "http://atomgiant.com/"
    )
  }

Also, don’t forget to include mod_redirect as one of your lighttpd server.modules

References:
The redirect code was adopted from here

I just found out that my comments were broken due to a bug
in Typo. They should now be working, so if you tried to leave a comment and failed, you should now be able to.

I am looking forward to Typo maturing to the point where it is not necessary to run off of the trunk.

All good things must start somewhere, and this is as good a place as any. My name is Tom Davies and I am starting this blog to share with you my thoughts on things ranging from software development to current projects that I am working on.

The first thing I would like to share is a website I developed called the GiftHat.com.

The Gift Hat is a site for storing and sharing your wishlists with your friends and family. I am currently seeking beta testers so if you have a few moments and would like to participate, please sign up.

The Gift Hat was developed using RubyOnRails. In future posts, I will expand on some of the technologies and techniques I used to develop the Gift Hat.