I want my "www" back! Halp!

[Shepherd Jim]

Hey Guys! I've been looking at .htaccess files for so long my eyes are permanently crossed!

...and now I'm told "Since version 2.3 Wordpress does the 301 redirect for you." and so I might not even need an .htaccess and so I shouldn't wonder what it should say one way or the other. ???

Okay! Here's the deal: I installed WP in my shared server in the subdir /wp/ and then after much trial and tribulation modified things so that when you type either "http://www.hatchtown.com" OR "http://hatchtown.com"you access the w/site, blog, the whole shebang.

But, no matter which URL variety you typed in the browser"s address window, it now shows you at http://hatchtown.com/ -- where's my "www"??

I thought I could do some simple redirect thingie but started to have trouble with my Permalinks.

Please be gentle. I'm really at the edge of my understanding here so need clear step by step instructions.

It's the weekend! Party party!

...as soon as I get this sorted out and make my wife happy.
She's like: "We PAID for the "www"! How can they take it away? Tell "them" we want a refund!"

Thanks! Jim

[dancole]

I'm against the WWW, and so are a lot of people... The reasoning behind this is that there is no point to redirect a perfectly good domain to some odd sub-domain of that domain. HTTP tells you your on the Internet's protocol called the web / hypertext protocol. hatchtown is your domain, which tells you what website your on and com is a top level domain. Some large sites may need sub-domains to manage all the different pages, but www doesn't do anything but lead users into bad habits and waste their time with useless characters.

With that said, I would redirect through the HTTPD config file, but I wouldn't know if that is a valid option for everyone.

JOKE
I wish I could see what my site looks like for other people, but when ever I visit it, I get redirected to the lww (Local Wide Web) sub-domain.

[PeterButler]

Hey Jim -

Have you tried adding in the www. to the Blog address (URL) and Wordpress Address (URL) on the Settings->General admin panel?

[Shepherd Jim]

I'm against the WWW, and so are a lot of people... The reasoning behind this is that there is no point to redirect a perfectly good domain to some odd sub-domain of that domain.,,,<snip>

Hey Dan: As you stated would be the case, you're not the first person I've run across that thought my fight to get my "www" back was pointless; even negative.

I have to admit that my understanding of domains, sub-domains on the fine granular level is less than complete.

What I do know is that for maybe 12 years we've been advertising our website as www.hatchtown.com. My wife and I are both 58; most of our customers are closer to our age than 20-something. Back in "the day" (sorry! ...had to say it) if you had a website it had better start with "www" and end with "dot com." Anything else was never going to be remembered by the unsophisticated users of the day.

Hey, back then we were absolutely positive that any sort of long or multiple word domain name would always fail.

Also, over the years we've established a lot of links to a variety of our pages from other sites in our "industry." I know that a hyperlink using the "www." would (could) "find" our site at http://hatchtown.com, but wouldn't it all be simpler if everything used the "www?"

Anyway, please point me to anything I can read about the www controversy. I'm really trying to better understand domain nomenclature and the mysteries of SEO.

Jim

[Shepherd Jim]

Have you tried adding in the www. to the Blog address (URL) and Wordpress Address (URL) on the Settings->General admin panel?

Hey Peter: That's exactly what I did and it worked pretty smoothly. After you make this kind of change it seems like there's always a minute or two during which you receive "not found" error messages. Sometimes the change seems to work its way through the Permalinks. Other times, you lose the site and have to go into phpMYadmin to wind things back to a working state.

I still want to learn more about the .htaccess file.

[dancole]

I haven't read much about the WWW controversy in a while, so I wouldn't know any links. I do know that the creator of WordPress is against them and even created a plugin for it.

I'll go into .htaccess just for the fun of it, since the problem has been solved...

HTTPD (also known as Apache) is the actual program that redirects and processes web page requests to the files on the server (computer). The config file for this program has a setting to enable .htaccess and there by grant some of its permissions to this file for the directory that the .htaccess file is located in.

For most people using a 3rd party hosting service means: 1) They don't have access to the HTTPD config file. 2) Do have htaccess enabled. While I prefer the config file, either one works. To force everyone to www you need to do a 301 redirect or permanent redirect. The code you would place in the .htaccess file would be something like:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^hatchtown.com/ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.hatchtown.com//$1 [L,R=301]

The 301 is a HTTP staus message and you could use some other 300 level (redirect) status, but the 301 is going to be the best for SEO, since it acknowledges that you are moving the web page for good. By the way... you could do a 301 redirect from www to non-www and search engines would be just as happy with your website.

[Jeffro]

Yep, the way dan cole described the redirect is the way in which I used to force people to the www version of the site. I was told that if I didn't do that, page rank and search engine stuff would split between the two versions, perhaps worst case scenario, one or the other shows up as duplicate content.

But, since they included conical URLs in core, I set my blog url and install url to WWW and it works.