robots.txt Rerouting on Development Servers
Every website should have a robots.txt file. Some bots hit sites so often that they slow down performance, other bots simply aren't desirable. robots.txt files can also be used to communicate sitemap location and limit request rate. It's important that the correct robots.txt file is served on development servers though, and that file is usually much different than your production robots.txt file. Here's a quick .htaccess snippet you can use to make that happen:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} devdomain
RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots-go-away.txt [L]
The robots-go-away.txt file most likely directs robots not to index anything, unless you want your dev server to be indexed for some reason (hint: you really don't want this).
![5 HTML5 APIs You Didn’t Know Existed]()
When you say or read "HTML5", you half expect exotic dancers and unicorns to walk into the room to the tune of "I'm Sexy and I Know It." Can you blame us though? We watched the fundamental APIs stagnate for so long that a basic feature...
![9 Mind-Blowing Canvas Demos]()
The <canvas> element has been a revelation for the visual experts among our ranks. Canvas provides the means for incredible and efficient animations with the added bonus of no Flash; these developers can flash their awesome JavaScript skills instead. Here are nine unbelievable canvas demos that...
![Cross Browser CSS Box Shadows]()
Box shadows have been used on the web for quite a while, but they weren't created with CSS -- we needed to utilize some Photoshop game to create them. For someone with no design talent, a.k.a me, the need to use Photoshop sucked. Just because we...
![Create an Animated Sliding Button Using MooTools]()
Buttons (or links) are usually the elements on our sites that we want to draw a lot of attention to. Unfortunately many times they end up looking the most boring. You don't have to let that happen though! I recently found a...
Here’s an example showing how to include multiple development domains:
RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^localhost [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^example.dev [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^test.example.com [OR] RewriteCond %{HTTP_HOST} ^staging.example.com RewriteRule ^robots.txt$ robots-disallow.txt [L]use vagrant