On Nov 1, 2012, at 6:14 AM, Mark Lawrence wrote:
Hi everyone,
Just starting to understand that there are different versions of my URL out there and it can be best to have the all link to the ‘clean’ version of my URL.
i.e. non WWW versions redirected to my WWW URL
As I understand it, this is called a 301 redirect.
Has there been an Action written which helps with this problem.
No, because Freeway cannot create a file that begins with a ‘.’ – that makes it invisible in the Finder. The way this is managed on most of the servers in the world is with what’s called an .htaccess file.
I might also add, this is getting to the limit of my knowledge of the subject, so please treat me as a layman! 
If you have Fetch, or CyberDuck, or Transmit (my favorite), first log in to your host, and then turn on the option to “show hidden files” in your FTP application. You will probably see a bunch of files you never worried about before, likely to do with logging visits to your site, or the control panel, or similar.
Look in your site folder (htdocs, public_html, www – it can be named literally anything – it will be the folder that also contains your index.html file) for a file named .htaccess. If you don’t see one, you can create one with your FTP application. Once you do, double-click it to open in your default editor. (Transmit has a built-in editor that is perfect for these sorts of things.)
If you already have one, then you will see the base directives for your site. Don’t edit them, just add new directives to the bottom of the file. Look carefully through the existing directives to see if you see this line:
RewriteEngine On
If you do, don’t add it a second time as I indicate below; drop that direction from the following ones.
Edit the following to match your real domain name, and add to your .htaccess file:
RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.com$ [NC]
RewriteRule ^(.*)$ http://www.example.com/$1 [R=301,L]
This will redirect all requests for all pages to the “bare” domain to the www subdomain. The redirect will tell the client unambiguously, “this resource has moved permanently – don’t come back looking for it here any more”. That’s what the 301 means.
Now save the .htaccess file and refresh your browser. If you still see your site, then the redirect will work. If you see a nasty 500 error (Server Configuration Failure) then you will have to delete or rename the .htaccess file and ask your hosting provider what to do next. They may have configured their server to not allow you to enable rewriting, or they may not have mod_rewrite installed. Either way, it’s out of your control, and you’ll have to file a support ticket to get it resolved.
Walter
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