Level Up - Webmaster: How To Randomly Redirect Visitors To Different Websites

There is a very simple method using PHP to have visitors automatically redirected to another site.

Why this is useful:
- User clicks "Take me to a random" page. You can finely-tune the random outcome.
- You are doing some A/B testing and want to sent users to different locations to test.
- Or, like me, you want to share your various websites/games, from a single button.

Try clicking
Ex: http://apps.simplyadvanced.net/windows8/redirect

Step 1: Here's all the PHP code that you need:

$urls = array("siteA.com",
              "siteB.com",
              "www.example.com"); $url = $urls[array_rand($urls)]; header("Location: http://$url"); ?>

Step 2: Done

Or, if you want to redirect the visitor after they visit a certain URL on your domain, then simply create an "index.php" file in the public directory that you want users to be redirected from, then the above code is all that you need to put in it.

Try it: Random Windows 8 Games created by me.
Try it: Random Windows Phone Games created by me.

~ Danial Goodwin ~

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My Android Apps | My Windows Phone Apps | My Developer Blog

Level Up - Webmaster: How To Shorten Default MediaWiki URL to Short (Canonical) URL Form

This was my first time shortening the URL for MediaWiki to canonical form and it literally took me less than five minutes to fully complete and test. I bet you can do it in two minutes.



Quick and easy directions:
1. Go to MediaWiki ShortURL Builder (Your wiki will have to be temporarily public)
2. Type in your current URL, for me it was " http://danialgoodwin.com/mediawiki/w/"
3. When you click "Go", make sure the article path says "/wiki/$1" or wherever you would like your MediaWiki to appear to users.
4. You now have all the code at your fingertips to place on your server. I used a GUI FTP client (like FileZilla) to transfer the new data because that was the quickest for me.


The Code:
If your configuration is the exact same as mine, then you can use these following sections of code to enable the shortcodes.

At the root of your domain, in the .htaccess file (make it if you don't have it), include (I added the "REGION" comments just for readability and future maintenance):

# REGION Redirects for MediaWiki Short Canonical URLs
RewriteEngine OnRewriteRule ^/?wiki(/.*)?$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/mediawiki/w/index.php [L]RewriteRule ^/?$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/mediawiki/w/index.php [L]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-fRewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-dRewriteRule ^/?mediawiki/w/images/thumb/[0-9a-f]/[0-9a-f][0-9a-f]/([^/]+)/([0-9]+)px-.*$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/mediawiki/w/thumb.php?f=$1&width=$2 [L,QSA,B]
RewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-fRewriteCond %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}%{REQUEST_URI} !-dRewriteRule ^/?mediawiki/w/images/thumb/archive/[0-9a-f]/[0-9a-f][0-9a-f]/([^/]+)/([0-9]+)px-.*$ %{DOCUMENT_ROOT}/mediawiki/w/thumb.php?f=$1&width=$2&archived=1 [L,QSA,B]
# ENDREGION Redirects for MediaWiki Short Canonical URLs

In your MediaWiki's LocalSettings.php file, insert the following lines (preferably right under "$wgScriptPath" and "$wgScriptExtension" just to keep things organized):

## Added for short URLs.$wgArticlePath = "/wiki/$1";$wgUsePathInfo = true;
## Added for short URLs because .htaccess on root includes 404 thumbnail handler config.$wgGenerateThumbnailOnParse = false;

Note: With this method, you don't even need a /wiki/ directory to make it appear that all the files are there. You should use this method so that when you make changes to the backend, the frontend will still be the same for users, search engines, and SEO. It also makes URLs easier to remember and more.

More detailed information: Manual:Short_URL

~ Danial Goodwin ~

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My Android Apps | My Windows Phone Apps | My Developer Blog