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 ^(.*)$ https://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!
