htaccess help?

[salewit]

Oh boy what a week its been! I'm STILL trying to configure OSCommerce. Anyway, I discovered the problem.

I'm setting this up on a multi-hosted domain, and I was trying to use the shared SSL. But it would never go into secure mode. I was just about to submit a ticket when I realized what it was.

I have my .htaccess file to rewrite the URL for this multi-hosted, so whenever it tries to go to the secure server, this thing rewrites the header.

Does anyone know of a way to keep the URL clean while still allowing the secure server? Maybe some way of saying "rewrite the URL to domain.com UNLESS contains secure22.nocdirect.com"?

Here's my htaccess:

RewriteEngine on
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^www\.domain\.com(:80)?$
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^domain\.com(:80)?$
RewriteRule ^(.*) http://www.domain.com/$1 [L,R]

Thanks
Sam

[jason]

I think another RewriteCond should do it:

RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} !^secure22\.nocdirect\.com(:443)?$

If I'm reading it correctly (I'm no mod_rewrite expert) what you are trying to do is change the domain name in the request to www.domain.com, unless it is already www.domain.com. Adding that line should prevent rewriting if the domain is secure22.nocdirect.com as well.

Try it out. IF it works, great. If not I'll take another stab at it.

--Jason

[Connie]

If Jasons suggestion doesn't work try this.


RewriteCond %{HTTP_REFERER} !^https://host22.nocdirect.com/~username/.*$ [NC]

[salewit]

Thanks for the help. Actually neither of them worked alone, but when I put them both in, it works perfectly! Weird. Btw, where did you guys learn this? I searched for help on htaccess and got some sites with tutorial, but none of them touched on this at all.

Anyway, that solved that problem, but now I'm having a new problem with OSCommerce ... posted in another message.

[jason]

The official mod_rewrite documentation is at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/mod/mod_rewrite.html, with an OK tutorial at http://httpd.apache.org/docs/misc/rewriteguide.html. A working knowledge of regular expressions is also handy, since all of the rewriting rules are based on them. The rest comes from trial and error and experience.

--Jason

[Connie]

Originally posted by salewit
Thanks for the help. Actually neither of them worked alone, but when I put them both in, it works perfectly! Weird. Btw, where did you guys learn this? I searched for help on htaccess and got some sites with tutorial, but none of them touched on this at all.

Anyway, that solved that problem, but now I'm having a new problem with OSCommerce ... posted in another message.

That is Weird. The mod I posted works or at least used to work on a test site.

I have switched to a self signed certificate and have not used the server certificate for a long time.

I wonder if the difference is due to different shopping carts? I don't use the OS commerce cart.

Anyway glad you got it working.

I would suggest if your serious about your e-commerce business that you purchase your own certificate. They are not expensive and it will give your site a more professional look which will build customer confidence in placing an order on your site.

[salewit]

Yes I was actually inquiring about it on another post here. At first I thought they were like $300 a year which is way too high for me. Now I'm seeing them around $50.

I'm going to stick with the shared SSL at least until I can get Google to list my items properly. I figure that will take a few months.

Back to the htaccess, does the ORDER in which these things list matter? Because at first I put jason's on the bottom, then removed that and put yours on the bottom and neither worked. Then I put jason's on top, didn't work, then yours right after his and it worked. So it may be that yours does work alone, but it seems that the positioning makes a difference.

Sam

[Connie]

Originally posted by salewit
Yes I was actually inquiring about it on another post here. At first I thought they were like $300 a year which is way too high for me. Now I'm seeing them around $50.

I'm going to stick with the shared SSL at least until I can get Google to list my items properly. I figure that will take a few months.

Back to the htaccess, does the ORDER in which these things list matter? Because at first I put jason's on the bottom, then removed that and put yours on the bottom and neither worked. Then I put jason's on top, didn't work, then yours right after his and it worked. So it may be that yours does work alone, but it seems that the positioning makes a difference.

Sam

I think the cost is $45.00 per year purchased through Jag. Jag will install the SSL cert for you.

I don't think your SSL will have any affect with Google.

I have no answer about why the Mod Rewrites had to be in a certain order to work other than OS Commerce is a completely different cart than I use. The Mod Rewrite I gave works with the perl based cart I use.

I did look at the OS Commerce cart at one time as a possible replacement to our currant cart but decided against it.

If your concerned about search engine rankings then you need to stay away from any cart like OS Commerce. Most search engines get lost in carts that use dynamically prdoduced pages.


Jason has some experience with OS Commerce. He may have a better explanation about the Mod ReWdrite.

[salewit]

Originally posted by clssam
I don't think your SSL will have any affect with Google.

No I didn't mean that the SSL would have an effect on Google. I just meant that until Google has my site in their sites, there is no use in my starting the one year SSL since nobody will be able to find my site until Google "says so".

My experience with new sites tells me that this is generally 2-3 months before it appears on Google.

[Ron]

30 days or less on anything in my site. The more frequeently you update your site, the more frequently Google will index it.

[Galen]

Y'know, you could just submit your site to Google instead of waiting around for them to find it on their own.

[salewit]

Well maybe things have gotten better since the last site I submitted, but about a year ago I can remember checking Google regularly after submitting a new site and kind of remember it taking almost 3 months. It would be great if it's quicker now!

[Ron]

ohhh yeah a NEW site takes forever... just be sure to update your site very frequently. I didn't update my site for a looooong time while I was on the road last year, and it really hurt my rankings in some areas, and frequency of indexing and update in the catalog was one of them.

[salewit]

Well I'm amazed at the whole SEO thing. I was reading a lot about it over on the OSCommerce support site. Some guys there think that changing your item pricing too much or too frequently will actually hurt your standings. In once case a guy said he dissappeared off of Google entirely after he changed his prices. Everyone has a theory of how it works, but nobody seems to know for sure. All I know is that Google is now one powerful company. If they don't spider you, you might as well pack it up.

[Ron]

I get nearly as many hits from msn and yahoo