Getting rid of the 'www' prefix
09 Jul, 06
[langde]Dieser Eintrag ist nur auf Englisch verfügbar.[/langde]
You may or may not have heard about the no-www movement. All my sites have always been reachable with and without the www prefix, and I personally never use the www prefix if I can avoid it. I won’t get into the details of why it is a bad idea, but consider this: no one calls the web ‘WWW’ anymore, and this ‘abbreviation’ is a lot longer than the expansion (‘double-you double-you double-you’ vs ‘world wide web’). If anything, the prefix should be ‘web’.
Starting today, I’m having all my domains permanently redirect to the non-www version of the hostname.
Here’s a simple mod_rewrite recipe that should work for any domain:
RewriteEngine On
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^www\.(.*)$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://%1/$1 [R=301,L,NS]
Put it inside a a <Location "/"> block in the appropriate VirtualHost block, or inside.htaccess in the document root of your site (it doesn’t seem to work in a VirtualHost block in the server config, any ideas why?).
It’s like magic.
[no-www-prefix-remove-rewrite#comment586]
didnt the mutant always do that?
besides, i never understood why sites dont have it by default
by fengor on Jul 9, 2006 @ 04:49pm
[no-www-prefix-remove-rewrite#comment587]
I never type the WWW, anyway, and I’m always slightly annoyed, if sites aren’t reachable without it. Didn’t know there was a whole organized group though.
by sankatze on Jul 9, 2006 @ 06:29pm
[no-www-prefix-remove-rewrite#comment588]
The mutant was always reachable with and without prefix, but it didn’t redirect.
(It still doesn’t, only moeffju.net and sibling sites do.)
by moeffju on Jul 10, 2006 @ 12:11am
[no-www-prefix-remove-rewrite#comment589]
Hi Matt, long time no see :) How are you??
Well… I never liked the www… it’s annoying.
by Juliana on Aug 27, 2006 @ 08:48pm
[no-www-prefix-remove-rewrite#comment590]
We could not get this to work in the apache configuration file but it seems to work just fine in an .htaccess file.
by Joseph Crawford on Mar 31, 2007 @ 01:23am
[no-www-prefix-remove-rewrite#comment591]
The no-www movement…
Starting today I am no longer going to use the www. on my domain name. There are a few reasons I have come to this conclusion. In my opinion my domain is josephcrawford.com the www. is just a sub-domain of my domain. The www. in a domain name was ju…
by Joseph Crawford on Mar 31, 2007 @ 03:50am
[no-www-prefix-remove-rewrite#comment592]
You should remove the image from comments if it is a trackback rather than showing the big ?, maybe show a trackback image or something to visually seperate them.
by Joseph Crawford on Apr 10, 2007 @ 01:00am