COMP 202 Links for Previous Semesters

Dung Nguyen noticed that the links for previous semesters that I have on my Fall 2008 COMP 202 page all lead back to my own page.

I looked at the HTML source, and I do redirect to Owlnet, where the COMP 202 page used to be. For Fall 2007, for example, I link to http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~comp202/04-fall. Something must have happened to the website on Owlnet. I tried to log in, but the SSH password that I have for comp202 does not work anymore. Neither did my comp212 password.

When I logged in with mgricken, though, I was able to see that the comp202 page has been redirected to CLEAR at http://www.clear.rice.edu/comp202 regardless of what actual page was being requested from Owlnet. For example, http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~comp202 was being redirected to http://www.clear.rice.edu/comp202, which is what I wanted, but http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~comp202/04-fall was being redirected to the same place.

Once I had figured out how to log into CLEAR, I could see that the CLEAR page at http://www.clear.rice.edu/comp202 redirects to my page… And that’s why all roads lead to me :-)

As a simple fix, I just changed my links to point to the right pages on CLEAR, e.g. to http://www.clear.rice.edu/comp202/04-fall.

I think we should also edit the redirection, which IT must have put in place without talking to us, and make it work as it should. If we don’t, then links that we may have elsewhere and that point to Owlnet don’t working either.

The web is a rather transient place. There really is no point to put up an “under construction” sign, because any website always is under construction.

Update

Changing the .htaccess file to

[cc]RedirectMatch ^/~comp202/(.*)$ http://www.clear.rice.edu/comp202/$1[/cc]

should do the trick.

Update

IT set up the redirection according to my suggestion now. Requests for Owlnet pages are now redirected to the corresponding CLEAR page. Try it:

http://www.owlnet.rice.edu/~comp202/06-fall now redirects properly to http://www.clear.rice.edu/comp202/06-fall/.

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About Mathias

Software development engineer. Principal developer of DrJava. Recent Ph.D. graduate from the Department of Computer Science at Rice University.
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