You may have noticed our new top news story – PaperCut’s new home at www.papercut.com. It’s great to finally have the papercut top level domain. It’s bound to make us more visible (and also looks a little “cooler”!). We’re now redirecting everyone across to the new domain. The process is a little bit like moving house… lots of things to do like updating contact details… but also a good excuse to throw out some junk and do a clean-up!

From a technical perspective, working out the best “method” to conduct the transition was a bit of a challenge. We decided on going for an HTTP 301-permanent redirect as suggested by Google. The process is however a little hit and miss in terms of search results as discussed in this interesting Wall Street Journal article.

The 301 redirect was put in place using an Apache .htaccess rule like:


RewriteCond %{REQUEST_METHOD} !^POST$ [NC]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} papercut\.biz$ [NC,OR]
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} papercutsoftware\.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.papercut.com/$1 [R=permanent,L]


The first line prevents the redirect occurring on POST requests – an important requirement as browsers don’t handle redirects on POSTs very well. Disabling redirects on POST ensures PaperCut’s “Report Error” feature continues to work.

Welcome to our new home!