Autoforwarding to a New Home Page
Department of Linguistics
UCLA
The best file name for a Home page uses the title index.htm or index.html. The reason is that it shortens your web address. For example, Colin Wilson's home page can be reached at http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/wilson/, even though its full name (which also works) is http://www.linguistics.ucla.edu/people/wilson/index.html.
If you already have a Home page with an inconvenient name, like Smith.htm, you can fix this. What you need to do is to move your Home page to index.htm, and replace your old Home page with a page that notifies the user of the change, then autoforwards to the new Home page .
To do this, download a file from this site, which can be modified to produce the forwarding file. Either download:
into a fresh folder, and use your unzipping software to unzip it, or (if you have a Windows machine but no unzipping software), download this:
into a fresh folder, click on it, and it will self-unzip.
Either way, the folder will now contain a file called AutoforwardingTemplate.htm. Here is the tricky part: don't use Webpage editing software to open it. It will just do its job, and autoforward! Instead, open it using a simple text editor like Notepad or Wordpad.
The file is likely to include stuff you don't understand, but it is straightforward to identify:
--the message to the user
--the old Web address
--the new Web address to forward to
Change these from the current values (taken from Bruce Hayes's Web site) to the right values for you.
Then, assuming your name is Smith:
--Copy your old Home page, Smith.htm" to Smith.htm.bak (i.e.,
back up your work before doing anything drastic).
--Rename Smith.htm as index.htm.
--Rename AutoforwardingTemplate.htm as Smith.htm.
--Upload Smith.htm to your Web site.
Then test to see if this works by pointing your browser to your old Website and seeing if it forwards.
Once you've got this working, please notify the members of the Department Web Site Committee so they can adjust the department links to go directly to your Home page.
Last modified March 11, 2001