Meta: How I Took My Site Dark 0

I have seen several posts from various bloggers saying that they supported yesterday’s blackout, but feared taking down their sites because they were afraid they couldn’t get them back up.

The solution is simple–you don’t take down your site. (I’m tempted to add, “For Pete’s sake!”)

When a browser hits a site, it resolves by default to a file named index.html. If no index.html is present, it looks for index.php, and so on, through the various recognized formats.

I created the redirection page to send browsers to nosopa.org and added a little text to it, so, if the redirection were delayed for some reason, users would know they had landed at the right place and why there was no there there.

I then used FTP to rename my index.html and index.php files to index.html.orig and index.php.orig (the browser doesn’t know what to do with a *.orig–my term for “original”–file) and to send my new index files to the website. I left the rest of the website untouched.

When a browser hit the site, it saw the new index files with the redirection command and sped over to nosopa.org.

Late last night, I used FTP to delete the special index files and renamed to *.orig files back to their regular names, and Viola! the site was restored.

Piece of cake.