Now that 2010 is just starting, many web designers have to update the copyright year on their own websites, and their client’s websites.

Many end up doing it manually and waste a lot of time with this tedious task, but some use a better method, and it’s as simple as one line of PHP.

Copyright <? print(Date("Y")); ?>

No longer do you have to manually edit the footer of your websites with each year that passes!

So, we had to figure out a way for both domains to still show the Chamber website, but to not lose the rankings and link juice for either website. As the websites are in PHP, we decided that the best way to go about this process was with .htaccess file re-directs. Pretty simple implementation involved as you can see from the small snippet of code below. All you have to do is add this code to your .htaccess file (create one if you do not have one already) , and yes, that is a period before the “h”.

.htaccess files only work on Apache servers so before you use them make sure your server allows this file.

Code:

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^www.fmbchamber.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.fortmyersbeach.org$1 [r=301,nc]

Options +FollowSymlinks
RewriteEngine on
rewritecond %{http_host} ^fmbchamber.com [nc]
rewriterule ^(.*)$ http://www.fortmyersbeach.org$1 [r=301,nc]

It is pretty obvious what is going on in this code. I am telling the server to permanently redirect any fmbchamber.com and www.fmbchamber.com url’s to www.fortmyersbeach.org. I threw this together real quick and I’m sure hardcore php developers have a much cleaner way of coding this, but this snippet works perfectly for its purpose.